Monday, February 2, 2009

5800 XpressMusic - Review

Yep, i buyed the first S60 touch device by nokia... i've been using it for a couple days, so lets talk about the goods and the bads: The goods:
  • The screen is perhaps the best screen i ever saw in a mobile device, a little smaller than iphone but with increased resolution, it has an awesome constrast and bright (i use it with bright on lower settings).
  • The battery looks like it gives what it promises, i used it for 2 days on a intensive kinda way and it is still kicking
  • The performance doesn't make it the fastest device, i won't recomend it for 3d games, but it is quite fast on most of the tasks, reproducing video with 640x368@25fps without trouble.
  • Connectivity tests were flawlessly, Wi-Fi wizard configuration is quite intuitive, bluetooth sincronization with hands-free headset was easy, trully a nice experience on this point, helping all this browser is really good rendering pages very similar to desktop way, flash lite 3.0 is a nice think as it supports flash 8 videos and animations.
  • The GPS works quite well ... Nokia Maps and Google Maps (google maps works really well on this device!) provide a nice interface and worked quite smoothly.
  • Multimedia features are quite nice, video, music, radio and images are presented/rendered nicely, the interface on these aplications was quite well made.
The bads:
  • The interface while fast (except for auto-rotate in internet browser) it's not the most intuitive thing, sometimes you need to tap to select and to tap again to confirm, requiring a double tap, this usually happens in dropdown-like menus. There are also some gliches in browser and with mini-QWERTY keyboard (not that bad). Also in landscape mode the top bar of the browser (equivalent to the title bar and status bar of the desktop merged) is freaking huge the could save that area to the page and provide a bar identical to the one in portrait mode...
  • Lacks pre-loaded software, you can however download a bunch of free stuff in a aplication very similar to app store, some are trully free like QuickOffice (only for read documents not to edit), others are trials... the worst thing is that Adobe Reader 2.5 LE is TRIAL!!! I mean with all that bunch of pdf's that exist on the internet a pdf reader is quite handy but to not make it free when non-touch versions are free is freaking bad...
  • OS is not that open as most of people may think by look at nokia foruns, installing some applications may prove near to impossible (certificates are a pain), adding to that, the tools provided to development are beta or bug filled. The device is still 'green' require a some extra time to enable development of aplications worth the effort.
In the end is a nice device, lacks a bit in software support, but i read that firmware updates are arriving to correct some stuff (available in Asia). During the usage of this device i found some nice stuff that you may like if you have one of these:
  • Game Boy Color Emulator MeBoy - A freaking good java aplication that works pretty well with the touch interface provided by the phone to java aplications.
  • Google Maps -You know what this is ...
  • Handbreak - You WILL need this to watch your videos on the phone, SUPER is also a nice alternative.
  • Well .... this - I didn't tested all of them... lol
That's all ... enjoy ^__^

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