Nokia Mobile Talk

First, I would like to confess the fact that I’m utterly in love with the screen. The resolution of the 3.2 inch TFT screen is a gobsmacking 340×640, which is great for a mobile of this price bracket (all the other near/better than VGA resolution screens are found in mobiles that are vastly more expansive). The colours are great and are comparable to the PSP that I own, and viewing angles are great for a mobile screen of this size.

Granted, the screen on the iPhone has more vivid colour and is more responsive, but that’ll be comparing apples (pardon the pun) to oranges now, wouldn’t it? The Resistive TFT found on the 5800 is generally inferior to the iPhone’s Capacitive screen, although - as a bonus – the 5800’s screen is not limited to finger input only (like every other Resistive screen, you can tap on it with ANYTHING).

Compared to other Resistive screens, the 5800’s screen fairs well, with sufficient sensitivity. Although the fact its Resistive nature of the screen means that you will have to physically push in slightly for any finger input to register. Even then, I haven’t had much in terms of problems using my fingers. The screen gets extremely fingerprint ridden after a day of use though, and the fact that the screen is only encased in thick plastic (rather the mineral glass found on some pricier alternatives) makes one worry about its durability.

In terms of Navigation, it’s mostly standard S60 fair, although everything has been slightly reworked to more effectively support contextual touch-based navigation. This is primarily noticeable on the home screen, where a tap to the clock would lead you to the Clock application, a tap on the date/time opening up a list of profiles/link to the calendar, a tap on the space that houses the connection/activity indicators opening up a small window that lists down the indicated activity with a link to the Connectivity app.

Also, conveniently enough, a tap on the Media Bar button next to the XpressMusic branding will bring up the ever useful Media Bar no matter where you are.

There is also an option to replace the standard S60 Shortcut Bar with the new Contacts Bar interface. This contacts-centric interface lists down all communicative activities with 4 contacts that you have chosen. I personally find this option irrelevant to how I use my 5800, so I prefer to stick to the traditional Shortcut Bar (mind the low quality contact Images. They COULD look much better, I just never bothered to replace them with better ones).

The recent S60 voice recognition navigation is also included, doing quite well in places with acceptable levels of ambient noise. The fact that it is non-speaker dependent (works well with anybody’s voice) is also great.

Other than that, S60 main menu is still typical S60, with optimization in size of fonts and icons to facilitate finger navigation; arguably at the cost of efficiency as the icons are far too big. This results in more wasted space then I would have liked within the Symbian menu. The default, from the box arrangement of the menu makes no apparent sense as well, as could be seen from how I’ve re-arranged everything for more efficient navigation.

There is also a slightly exasperating inconsistency with single- and double-taps found throughout the interface, with little or no rationality behind it. I finally gave up trying to make sense of this after a few days.

The lack of proper multi-selection in any form is also a maddening minus, thankfully enough third-party apps exist to alleviate this problem but why is such a core process such as multiple file selections so hard to implement within the core OS?

Another popular question that I’ve been asked is the smoothness and speed of the interface itself. As a Symbian based device, it impresses. The 5800 has one of the fastest and smoothest that I have come across – most of the time. Sometimes, though, particularly when the background apps start heaping up and/or available memory start dwindling; the entire system crawls to a halt until you close the offending apps (or restart).

But I do have to say that the amount of programs that has to run for this to happen is quite admirable for a Symbian system with a (relatively) puny 369MHz processor (with NO 3D hardware of any kind) and only 128MBs of RAM. Thus, generally, if one takes that into account (and run applications accordingly), the 5800 won’t disappoint.

On some rare occasions, there are also split-seconds of lag that happens for no apparent reason. These are hoped to be smoothened out by the firmware people at Nokia within the next couple of months.

As for the OS, while Symbian S60 is a relatively mature platform, Symbian 9.4/S60v5 is not quite there yet. The relative newness of this variant of S60 would mean that there will be some programs that will not run as well (or run at all) on the 5800. But this is a problem that we will see being addressed by developers progressively throughout the next few months leading up to the launch of the next, S60v5 powered Nokia Flagship, the N97.

THREE MONTHS LATER: Still in love with the screen, especially how it can be so huge on a mobile so compact. In terms of beauty though, the Omnia HD’s huge Capacitive AMOLED screen has already trumped even the iPhone 3G IMHO, more so the lowly 5800. Nonetheless, things are shaping up to be better than expected on other fronts. Ever since the V20 firmware rolled out, the 5800 is noticeably faster and more stable. More S60v5 compatible programs are also being released, much to my delight. The release of Gravity AND Nokia’s own Image Browser unleashed the potential of kinetic scrolling, which really needs to be utilized everywhere!

Next: The Camera and other Media Capabilities of the 5800.