Sunday
Nokia 5530 4 GB XpressMusic Black/Red
Looks & feel: about standard candy-bar size but maybe slightly smaller if anything. There's a reassuring solidity to it and it fits wonderfully in the hand, with the unlock key on the side just right to be slid down by your thumb. As the phone is almost entirely touch-screen, the screen is large and is topped and tailed by a pair of speakers. The back cover clips off very easily and could give rise to complaints of flimsiness, but I like it - it comes off and clips on without any hassle, unlike every other mobile I've ever had. There's a stylus under the back cover which I suspect could be a very handy thing, though I haven't got round to trying it yet.
In use the telephone part works with no concerns. Because it's a touchscreen, you have to manually bring up the keypad to dial and then once in a call, do it again if you need to press option keys (if you're phoning a bank, say). It's slightly counter-intuitive to have to remember that, but you get the hang of it pretty fast. Otherwise, using the phone is easy and sound quality is great. Reception is better than my old phone by some way. Similarly texting and setting up e-mail are both very straightforward and work well.
The thing about the keypad shows up in other ways in the OS (to be fair this is my first touchscreen, though I've had Nokias before) and here and there they've changed how you access things, which takes a bit of retraining but again once you've got it it works fine. Some things are buried in nested menus and not quite where you thought they would be - to be fair again, though, that was me just trying it straight out of the box withoutlooking at the manual! Once I knew where things were it was fine.
One of the main reasons for getting this phone is the music player, which is superb. The OS and sound quality are first class and there are lots of options, and with the memory expandable to 16Gb you can get tons of music on there. It has a standard headphone connector so you can use your own, which is a plus. In fact I'm planning to use it as my main portable music device as well as my mobile - the music player is good enough to use on its own (and I'm fussy about these things). Elsewhere, there's a camera (only so-so but that's not really why you'd buy this phone anyway) and video recorder/player, which I haven't tried yet.
The touchscreen interface on the whole works very well. I was a bit worried about finger marks but the screen seems pretty resistant to grubby paws, I'm pleased to say. It also buffs up nicely with a soft, dry cloth (or the end of a tie for us office types!). You have to learn when to single-tap and when to double, and when to scroll the page up & down with the side-bar and when you can drag it around (it works like moving a map page around on Multimap). Thus if you're used to computers you'll probably get the hang of this phone much more quickly.
Finally there's mobile internet and a WiFi connection too, and viewing pages on that screen should be a pleasure.
- superb quality, excellent phone/SMS/MMS/music player/web browser
- large memory capacity with micro SD card
- mostly brilliant touchscreen display, pin-sharp definition and largely intuitive to use
- can be used as a mass sorage device via USB connection
0 comments:
Post a Comment