iThoughts

My girlfriend has a new handy: the Nokia Xpress 5800 (and I chose it for her). It features a touchscreen, a 3.2MP camera (with autofokus and flashlight), WLAN, boasting with its music capabilities and all the other usual stuff you get with smartphones today and costs about 300€. It also has a touchpen for writing. Whooho.

As an iPhone-user I can only judge that thing from my viewpoint and compare it with the iPhone. PRO Nokia:

• First, its price is only approximately half (or even one third) that of an iPhone (which is REALLY nice).
• It has a camera button on the outside that lets you directly switch to camera mode and that also trigger the camera, so you don’t have to watch the touchscreen to tip on a softbutton to make a snapshot.
• The speakers rule. Listening to loud music is possible with this thing.
• You don’t need iTunes or some other software to get music or video on that phone. You got the OVI-suite if you want to use that.
• You can just use it as USB-mass-storage. IPhone users dream of that and can only use Wi-Fi apps that do the same, but those need a Wi-Fi key to connect.
• You can do handwriting instead of using the softkeyboard.
• There’s a really BIG softkeyboard that uses the full screen and only leaves a small part of the rest of the background visible where the text is displayed.
• Some nice shortcuts: kamera (button on the outside), clock (tap on the displayed time), the mediabar (one tap for that and there are shortcuts for browser, music player & more). Some more shortcuts can be put on the standard screen, which is nice.
• Headphones are plugged into a controller where you can skip to the next track of music or take an incoming call.

Well thats it with the good stuff, here comes the bad:

• The touchscreen doesn’t feel as insensible as most windows-mobile-devices I tried, but you still have to press it. The Nokia has a plekron attached and includes a small pen to help you with that but iPhoneuse is just easier and more exact.
• There’s no multitouch.
• Most of the time you need more than three touches to come to the application you want. But there are some nice shortcuts (mentioned in the PRO section above).
• The plastic looks a bit cheap, the touchscreen is not made of glass but of some plastic.
• The menus and the browser are not really nice-to-use. Its manageable tough.
• The apps are mostly pretty basic. I didn’t see the OVI-apps so far.
• I can type much faster on an iPhone.
• This might be the most important point: Even when the Nokia has a lot of features, my girlfriend still reaches out for my iPhone if she wants to look something up on the web.

After all, I think the Nokia was a good choice. Its not too costy, and if you dig a bit into it, you can really make good use of that phone. I like it, even if I like the iPhone much better.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Nokia looks to Ovi to compete with Apple’s App Store (telegraph.co.uk)
• Review: Nokia XPressMusic 5800 (crunchgear.com)
• Carlos Morgado: Nokia 5800 (chbm.net)