This phone is Nokia’s first try at a touch interface along the lines of the iPhone. It has a very compact, slightly elongated footprint. It’s quite a light phone for its screen size of 3.2-inches. The 5800 is a well designed phone with good build quality and finish. Although the body and battery cover are plastic, nothing feels cheap or flimsy. The menu and call accept/reject buttons, although small, are raised and are easy to use. The onscreen keyboard is a number based keypad and will be a snap for Symbian users although it’s not as fast to respond to a key strike as a hardware keypad; which takes getting used to. The Xpress Music button on the top right of the phone is touch-activated and simple to use. As mentioned, the resistive touch display is Nokia’s first and although this doesn’t work as well as the iPhone, it is an admirable effort nonetheless.

Basically the phone is plagued with a slow processor that while fast enough for mundane tasks lags when the screen is used. This becomes noticeable most of all while scrolling through certain menus where the phone’s interface lags. At times, the menu also ecomes a tad unresponsive. The screen is pretty clear and crisp and thanks to its large size, is very usable and fun to watch videos on. Music quality is good, but the loudspeaker should have been, well, louder. The 3.5-mm jack is well positioned at the top of the phone.

Signal quality in zone 1 was excellent although the phone didn’t perform proportionately well in zone 2 and the performance dropped quite a bit. Handsfree clarity is good and the phone’s loudspeaker is quite loud on call. The camera is good, and performs  as well as the other aspects of the device. It’s a feature-rich, touchbased phone that is novel enough to warrant recommendation — a good performer with a load of features that may never be used.

This phone is Nokia’s first try at a touch interface along the lines of the iPhone. It has a very compact, slightly elongated footprint. It’s quite a light phone for its screen size...