Nokia 5800 an iPhone killer?
The Nokia 5800 Express Music embraces touch screen based smart phone technology similar to that found in the Samsung Omnia, Blackberry Storm and Apple iPhone but for a lower price.
Although it lacks the sleek look and technological savvy of some of these models, the new Nokia handset is packed with useful features such as built-in GPS, 3.6Mbps 3G, auto rotate and a handy 16GB micro SD memory capability. The Symbian operating software is relatively basic and yet manages to come across as highly polished and easy to use, making navigation far more simple than other tiresome smart phone systems.
It seems oddly placed that Nokia branded this model as a music-based handset because there’s not much that sets it apart from any regular phone in this respect. Older music models have often boasted increased memory capabilities, mini speakers or play, pause, fast forward and stop buttons on the handset itself. The 5800 has none of these but it does, however, come standard with an incredibly useful mini headphone jack. This allows users to plug any set of headphones they like into the phone which is a drastic departure from the often useless and annoying brand-exclusive headphones that cellphone companies distributed with their handsets in the past.
The 5800 also comes standard with a stylus which can be used to navigate the smaller reaches of the interface. This, however, is where we found the biggest problem with the handset. In only a week’s worth of use the stylus severely scratched the screen several times while scrolling down in the browser. Although this may not seem like an enormous problem for review purposes it crossed our mind that many 5800s will be sold as upgrades in contracts, locking the user into the use of the phone for 24 months. If the screen was badly damaged in only a week the surely it would be rendered virtually unusable in several months.
Despite the fact that it exists to compete with rival smartphones, the 5800 lives up to its R5 000 price tag. One would venture as far as to say that it could be called the poor man’s iPhone. Although it boasts many of the features that today’s smartphones have become known for, it’s more of a sheep in wolf’s clothing than anything else.
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