Nokia 5800 Review
There’s quite a bit to like about the Nokia 5800:
- compact size, low weight
- good call quality
- over-the-air software updates
- good web browser
- high resolution screen
- good music player (you need to transfer the music directly to the card)
- good battery life
- 3.5mm headset jack
- acceptable E-mail client, minimal podcast client included
- Google Maps works well
- works flawlessly as a 3G tethered modem
- great speaker
So, it’s a useful, nice phone out of the box. However, it doesn’t even get close in terms of functionality or extensibility to something like the iPhone or an Android phone. Here are some problems:
- inconsistent, at times incomprehensible user interface
- inconsistent scrolling methods (scrollbar, dragging, work opposite ways)
- synchronizing contacts and calendars is manual and requires many clicks each time
- apps run in the background by default, running the phone out of memory
- almost no useful third party apps for S60 for the 5800
- many existing S60 apps don’t work or work poorly
- bad lookup method in the contact manager
- applications constantly ask for permission to access the network; this can’t be disabled
- the chat client is still useless
- the on-screen keyboard is as bad as the iPhone’s (but the plectrum actually helps a little)
- poor quality camera
- no USB charging
- Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer software for OS X transfers music so slowly that it’s useless
- Google Mail app works poorly
These are the usual problems of the aging Symbian “smart phone OS”. Touch makes dealing with some aspects of the awful Symbian UI a little easier (e.g., you don’t have to scroll through useless menus anymore in order to dismiss them, you just touch them), but at the cost of incompatibilities and cumbersome text entry. Overall, given the tiny collection of usable S60 applications, the Nokia 5800 is, for practical purposes, not a smart phone, but it’s a “dumb phone” with nice hardware and a limited OS.
I don’t see Nokia getting out of this mess either. Instead of partnering with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, TomTom, and Amazon to provide kick-ass applications for chat, mail, sharing, social networking, navigation, e-books, and on-line music, Nokia is trying to do it all themselves with Ovi.com, and they are failing miserably. Nokia knows how to make great phone hardware, but they don’t know how to make good software or user interfaces, and they have a serious case of NIH.
In the end, the Nokia 5800 is going to be the phone I use with my prepaid card, and it’s probably going to be the last Nokia phone I’m going to buy. Android is simply a far better smart phone OS than Symbian.
My advice to Nokia: make a clean break, retire Symbian, and switch to Android.
