Nokia 5800 Xpress Music VS iPhone

Reviews

Mai 16, 2009Mai 14, 2009
by Tim

My girlfriend has a new handy: the Nokia Xpress 5800 (and I chose it for her). It features a touchscreen, a 3.2MP camera (with autofokus and flashlight), WLAN, boasting with its music capabilities and all the other usual stuff you get with smartphones today and costs about 300€. It also has a touchpen for writing. Whooho.

As an iPhone-user I can only judge that thing from my viewpoint and compare it with the iPhone. PRO Nokia:

First, its price is only approximately half (or even one third) that of an iPhone (which is REALLY nice).
It has a camera button on the outside that lets you directly switch to camera mode and that also trigger the camera, so you don’t have to watch the touchscreen to tip on a softbutton to make a snapshot.
The speakers rule. Listening to loud music is possible with this thing.
You don’t need iTunes or some other software to get music or video on that phone. You got the OVI-suite if you want to use that.
You can just use it as USB-mass-storage. IPhone users dream of that and can only use Wi-Fi apps that do the same, but those need a Wi-Fi key to connect.
You can do handwriting instead of using the softkeyboard.
There’s a really BIG softkeyboard that uses the full screen and only leaves a small part of the rest of the background visible where the text is displayed.
Some nice shortcuts: kamera (button on the outside), clock (tap on the displayed time), the mediabar (one tap for that and there are shortcuts for browser, music player & more). Some more shortcuts can be put on the standard screen, which is nice.
Headphones are plugged into a controller where you can skip to the next track of music or take an incoming call.

Well thats it with the good stuff, here comes the bad:

The touchscreen doesn’t feel as insensible as most windows-mobile-devices I tried, but you still have to press it. The Nokia has a plekron attached and includes a small pen to help you with that but iPhoneuse is just easier and more exact.
There’s no multitouch.
Most of the time you need more than three touches to come to the application you want. But there are some nice shortcuts (mentioned in the PRO section above).
The plastic looks a bit cheap, the touchscreen is not made of glass but of some plastic.
The menus and the browser are not really nice-to-use. Its manageable tough.
The apps are mostly pretty basic. I didn’t see the OVI-apps so far.
I can type much faster on an iPhone.
This might be the most important point: Even when the Nokia has a lot of features, my girlfriend still reaches out for my iPhone if she wants to look something up on the web.

After all, I think the Nokia was a good choice. Its not too costy, and if you dig a bit into it, you can really make good use of that phone. I like it, even if I like the iPhone much better.