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Hardware 

The 5800 XpressMusic is Nokia's first true finger-touch phone to be announced in the lingering wake of Apple's iPhone. The 5800 - called the "Tube" when it first hit the rumor mill - is the first phone to use a new version of the S60 smartphone platform designed for touch-screen phones, creatively named "S60 Touch."

We recently had a brief hands-on session with the 5800. How does it rate? Well, it's definitely a mixed bag, with some exciting innovations, but also some major disppointments. Below is our full preview report.

Physically, the phone is a simple monolith. It's a nice size in terms of width and height, but it's significantly thicker than most of its competition.

Body  

The trend with touch screens these days is making them flush with the front of the phone, instead of recessed. The touch screen on the 5800 is flush with the plastic above and below it, but there is a bumper all around the edge of the phone that sticks up. This protects the screen a bit, but does take away from the look, and also attracts dirt like you wouldn't believe; the unit we tried was filthy.

Touring the rest of the front, you'll find a touch-sensitive Xpress shortcut button above the display, plus physical Send, End, and Home buttons below the display. On the side there is a memory card slot (an 8GB card is included) and an unusually easy-to-access SIM card slot. On the other side is a sliding lock switch. Unfortunately, it's a spring-loaded switch that just slides one way and pops back again. A sliding switch with two positions would have provided visual confirmation that the phone was locked, and been easier to manipulate one-handed.

On top you'll find a 3.5mm headphone jack that doubles as the A/V output (TV cables are included). Next to that is the micro-USB connector. The back sports a 3-megapixel auto-focus camera with dual LED flash. A large but flimsy stylus is also accessible from the back, and a guitar-pick-style stylus is included as well.

The 5800 uses a resistive touch screen, the same kind you'll find on the Instinct and Dare. This permits the use of a stylus, which in turn enables handwriting recgonition, something critical for Asian markets where Nokia hopes to sell many of these phones.

Unfortunately for those of us in the western hemisphere using using Latin characters, resistive touch technology doesn't deliver quite the same quality of experience compared to the capacitive technology used on the iPhone and HTC G1.

In all, the 5800 feels somewhat cheaper and less refined than what we're used to seeing from Nokia. We might attribute this to the non-final version of software and hardware we saw. You can tell, though, that Nokia is targeting the youth market segment, because everything about the phone feels cheaper and less polished than the N series product line does.

Software 

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  

QWERTY

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  

home

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  

vertical

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.

Video Tour 

Here is a very short video tour of the 5800 XpressMusic. Honestly, we would like to have filmed a lot more video to show you more of the phone's features, but our time was limited and Nokia was literally pushing us out the door. This is what we managed to film:

view article organized across multiple pages

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

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