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Nokia 5800 with S60 Touch Hands-On

Hardware Software Video Tour Comments  18  

For text entry, S60 Touch offers several options: QWERTY, numeric (T9), handwriting, and a special mini-QWERTY designed to be used with the stylus. The handwriting and mini-QWERTY input areas are small enough that they can be dragged around wherever you like on the screen. Oddly, the mini-QWERTY option offers some form of word auto-correction, while the larger QWERTY layout for your fingers does not. This is a major problem. The 5800 has haptic feedback, and it works fine, although it only enhances the typing experience slightly. We had trouble hitting the correct keys reliably, something haptics doesn't help with.

Text Entry  

In fact, typing out a few sentences, we couldn't spell a single word correctly using QWERTY; only T9 mode had large enough buttons to allow reliable text entry. It's important to note that the unit we tried was not running 100% final software, and our time with it was very brief. Therefore, software tweaks prior to release may improve QWERTY input, and it may be something that may improve with practice. However, we've had much better first-try experiences with many competing phones, so it's an issue to keep an eye on.

The interface should be familiar to anyone used to S60. If you simply imagine S60 tweaked for touch, it's almost exactly what you'd expect.

Menus  

Our one major gripe with the interface is that navigating most main menus and lists requires double-tapping, much the way you double-click icons on a PC. The reason is to allow a single-tap action that merely selects an icon/item, which then allows you to use options such as move/delete, etc. However basic buttons and sub-menus require only a single-tap, leading to confusing inconsistency. We found the constant double-tapping to be both unintuitive and cumbersome, and figuring out when to tap versus when to double-tap presented a definite learning curve.

Other than double-tapping, the interface is quite easy and enjoyable to use, and even has a few impressive innovations. On the home screen, you can set up a "contacts bar" with up to four of your favorite contacts. Choosing one, you see quick action buttons such as Call, Message, or RSS Feed, plus a list of all recent activity with that contact, including calls and messages.

Camera options  

In the camera, a single "options" button brings up a nearly full-screen visual options menu with icons, much like the wonderful camera interface on the LG Viewty. This makes it infinitely easier to access all key camera options; all touch-screen phones should work this way.

Certain interactions have become standard for this type of phone, and the 5800 supports the basics, such as auto-rotation and a swipe gesture to move between photos in the gallery, etc.

Browser  

In the browser, which supports Adobe Flash, there is the same type of intelligent zooming as on the iPhone. Just double-tap on what you want and it zooms right to it, fitting the content perfectly to the width of the display. The browser also has the same kind of full-screen visual tools menu as the camera, making certain tasks much easier to access. In general, the browser didn't disappoint.

The huge and beautiful display on the 5800 has the same wide-screen aspect ratio as HDTV. Video looks great on it, and when viewing SD content with the more squarish 4:3 aspect ratio, it offers you three handy options to make it fit: crop, stretch, or pillar-box.

In the US, the 5800 XpressMusic will be offered directly by Nokia in a version compatible with AT&T's 3G network.

Again, our time with the 5800 XpressMusic was brief. It didn't blow us away, but the new S60 Touch platform holds a lot of promise. It's not easy to completely re-do a platform like S60 to work well for touch, while keeping it consistent with the non-touch version, yet Nokia seems to have done a decent job of it. It's a robust touch interface that people used to S60 will feel right at home with. The 5800 is a decent first try, although mostly it just whet our appetite for the second round of S60 Touch devices. With improved text entry software and sleeker, slimmer hardware (think E71) Nokia could mount a real challenge to the iPhone.

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