Mobile Phone Reviews

Archive for the ‘Music Phones’ Category

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is Nokia’s first full touchscreen device and is one of the high-end phones in the XpressMusic range. This is a 3G smartphone made to compete with the iPhone. As you would expect from Nokia the handset is a sleek, stylish design with a clear, large, high-resolution 640 x 360 pixels screen. The screen makes using the interface a whole lot easier and is responsive to finger touch, stylus or plectrum. It also has a full virtual QWERTY keyboard and a handwriting recognition system to make communication simple.

Where the Nokia excels is with its camera and music system. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic uses proper camera technology and incorporates a Carl Zeiss lens, auto focus and LED flash. The video camera produces 30 frames per second and has full stereo sound, and the front mounted camera makes video conferencing possible.

It also includes an excellent music player with an easy to use interface, 8-band graphic EQ and headphone jack. Along with this comes an 8GB memory card, which can hold up to 2,000 mp3 tunes, with the option of upgrading to a 16GB if necessary.

Its superior download capacity means that using the browser you can easily watch clips from YouTube or MySpace without any jerky movements, and its Wi-Fi capacity makes logging on at the nearest hot spot simple.

Utilising all the positives from iPhone technology without being another hybrid clone, Nokia have included all the things you have come to expect from them and put them to good use with their latest model.

The newest Walkman phone in the range of Sony Ericsson mobile phones is, like its predecessor, the W580, intended as a music phone; that’s its whole reason for existing. It’s an improvement on the old model, adding 3.5G into the mix, making uploading and downloading decidedly faster.

In many ways, however, it’s not a great improvement on the W580. As before, the Walkman button transports the user to the music manager, which is a good, clean interface that’s easy to use. The screen itself is exceptionally bright and sharp, and the audio quality is everything that Sony Ericsson aims to deliver.

A 2GB M2 card comes with the phone for content, but, really, it needs to be much larger; anyone truly serious about music is going to want more storage than that. Also why, oh why, didn’t the company build in a 3.5mm headphone jack? Instead you need to use the proprietary jack that’s supplied, and even if it does allow two pairs of headphones to be plugged in to share music, it’s still not good enough.

The camera is adequate, but without autofocus or flash, it lacks two important items. That said, web browsing is very fast, given the HSDPA, and it’s very simple and quick to upload videos.

Ultimately, the Sony Ericsson just doesn’t quite cut the mustard as a fully-fledged music phone. There are better Sony Ericsson mobile phone offerings in this field. Really, this is a phone on which you can play a few tunes and take a few pictures – a mobile phone with some extras – and nothing more.