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By John Chan
Oct 03, 2008

It's interesting that Nokia decided to put its first touchscreen interface in a mass market mobile phone rather than in one of its premium Nseries multimedia devices. In any case, here it is, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic complete with the Finnish company's latest user interface (UI).

The S60 5th Edition interface

Naturally, the highlight of this device is the touchscreen-enabled Series60 (S60) interface. This is an extension of its current S60 3rd Edition UI and is dubbed S60 5th Edition. What happened to "4", you ask? Well, according to Tuula Rytila-Uotila, vice president for Live, GoToMarket, the company traditionally doesn't use that number in its products. The 5800 doesn't have a directional pad nor an Enter button but is instead fully controlled using the touchscreen. The resistive LCD allows you to use your fingers or a stylus for input. Going with the music theme, Nokia even included a plectrum--normally used with a guitar for plucking or strumming--as an alternative pointing device.

The Home screen on the 5800 prominently shows pictures or avatars of those contacts you want quick access to. Tapping on their pictures, you can then see your full activity with them on the screen and conveniently call or message them. Vital information like your RSS feeds and calendar appointments are also easily accessible via this Home screen. On the top right corner, a touch-sensitive button right above the LCD brings up a shortcut menu which allows you to get to places like your music and the Internet browser quickly.

Various text input methods have been implemented including a full QWERTY for landscape mode use, a mini QWERTY if you'd rather do your thumb typing in portrait format and the good old onscreen numeric keypad for one-hand operation. There is haptic feedback for every action performed, a useful feature when you don't have the tactility of physical keys.

In our short time with the phone, we found the mini QWERTY input much too small to be useful. On the flipside, the full QWERTY and numeric keypads both took up the entire screen so you can't see the screen you are in. That may also cause problems in some cases when you have to type in something while referring to text or images on the screen at the same time. For example, some Web pages have forms that require you to key in a randomly-generated string called a CAPTCHA to ensure that you are a real user. You need to see the browser page while typing in such cases and that might not be possible with input methods that fill the page. While we fully understand the need for these onscreen keypads to be large for accessibility, some size compromise or perhaps even transparency could have been implemented, so you can still see some of the original page.


L to R: Alphanumeric keypad, full QWERTY, mini QWERTY.
(click for larger images)

Much of what you expect on a S60 phone has been retained including the ability to bring up a list of running applications by holding the menu button. To quit any application, just press and hold the corresponding icon and a context menu will pop up for you to do so. According to Rytila-Uotila, programs created for current S60 phones will also work on S60 5th Edition though many of them have not been formatted for the 5800's 640 x 360 display and may look odd. The software development kit (SDK) for S60 5th Edition will be released to developers today and they will be able to tweak their current applications for this UI and create new ones, too. We tried installing fring, a popular VoIP/multi-IM app for S60 on the 5800. It installed fine and was able to run briefly before going into a restarting loop. Granted, the set we had was a prototype and developers have not had time with the new UI, so that's entirely forgivable. We feel that these teething problems will probably be sorted out very quickly in the weeks to come.

The 5800 XpressMusic

The 640 x 360-pixel display on the 5800 may seem strange at first because it's not the VGA (640 x 480) screens we are more used to seeing. The reason for this becomes clear when you think about its 16:9 aspect ratio. 640 x 360 is exactly one-quarter of 1280 x 720, the minimum resolution for something to be classified as high definition (HD). If you visit video sharing sites like Vimeo which allow you to upload HD clips, you will notice that the streaming clips are displayed at 640 x 360 within the browser. For a media-centric mobile phone like the 5800, this is ideal for watching movies and television clips originally formatted for HD displays. For comparison's sake, the 5800 has 50 percent more pixels than the iPhone 3G but has a smaller display which measures 3.2 inches diagonally.

In the hands, the 5800 didn't feel particularly solid because of the use of, primarily, a light plastic material. Though it is a mass market phone, the use of an entirely new UI is a big thing for Nokia and we wonder if the company could have at least made it feel a little more upmarket.

Internally though, there's little to complain about. This handset comes with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and a touchscreen display. An 8GB card is included as standard and the microSD card slot supports up to 16GB and even 32GB cards when that becomes commercially available. Having much storage is of course important to a music-focused mobile phone and that's further complemented by its built-in speakers and a 3.5mm audio jack so you can plug in your favorite headphones. This same jack also lets you output the sound and screen onto an external display using a TV-out cable that's also included by default. Nokia rates the 5800 for up to 9 hours of talktime and 35 hours for music playback.

Outlook

Though we expected Nokia's first touchscreen UI to appear on a high-end device like one of its Nseries or Eseries products, the birth of S60 5th Edition on a mass market phone like the 5800 has its advantages, too. For one, it has an amazing price of €279 (about US$386). That's phenomenal considering the features you get--a comparable Windows Mobile phone is easily 50 percent more expensive than that. Though Nokia wasn't too specific about which countries, it did tell us that the 5800 will be available in some Asian markets in Q4 2008. Watch out for our review once we get our hands on a full retail unit.

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