Video review of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic w/ touchscreen

If you are having a hard time waiting for the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (the "Tube") to hit the market, then we have a treat for you. We recently posted four 5 minute long high quality videos on YouTube that will let you see first hand how most of the major features of the first touchscreen equipped S60 smartphone work.

The phone we used for the videos is a pre-production device, but we are very happy to report that after many, many hours of use, we have only noticed two very small bugs so far. There are a few things that we expect to work faster with production firmware^(INFO), like the automatic screen rotation, but so far, the 5800 has been pretty darned solid.

And let me take this opportunity to eat some crow. I, personally, talked down the 5800 quite a bit. I ran through the demos at Mobile World Congress, saw the early video and photos, read the reports. I was convinced that the phone was going to be a bomb. I was very, very wrong. You heard it here first. I received the phone and had very low expectations for the user experience. I've been using a lot of touchscreen equipped phones lately, and have seen some real winners. I really didn't think the 5800 XpressMusic was going to be one of them. Boy, was I ever wrong.

This is a great phone. I'm happy to report that S60 5th Edition, even with the finger touch support, offers a very regular S60 user experience. The user interface does some things differently than most touch phones, most obvious being the way it handles scrolling and its tap once to select, tap again to activate navigation style, but it all works very well on the whole. It is intuitive and consistent.

There are a few things that I'm a bit disappointed in, though. For starters, I don't think the Active Standby screen themes allow for enough customization. With all of that screen real estate, I would expect more options. More shortcuts, more contacts, more options, more everything. I am also not 100% impressed by the way the full screen QWERTY keyboard works. There ought to be a mode that uses T9 when the phone is in portrait mode and the QWERTY keyboard when the phone is turned 90 degrees.