Nokia Mobile Talk

In terms of design, the responses of all that I showed the 5800 to varied from “Wow, nice phone” to “What a brick”, but I personally find that the 5800’s minimalist looks and angular tubbiness to be pleasant to the eyes.  Slightly thinner and wider than the W810i, the 5800 is a joy to hold in my small sized hands, although slightly harder to pocket when used with a silicone protector.

The keypad layout of the 5800 is notable for its near total absence, except maybe for the Call / Menu / Hang Up trio on the bottom of the fascia and the touch sensitive Shortcut Bar button next to the Xpressmusic branding.
So, how DO you type or dial on the 5800? Nokia has (thankfully) provided a whole set of virtual input methods for the Symbian 9.4 / S60 version 5 that runs on the 5800, including:

• Alphanumeric Keypad (the normal pad you find on most mobiles; best for one handed use).

• Full-screen QWERTY (a full screen, landscaped mini-keyboard; best for two handed use.

• Mini-QWERTY (small floating QWERTY keyboard; use with stylus, nearly useless in actual use)

• Input Recognition (a handwriting recognition pad; usable for Chinese and – if I figure how to do this out later – Japanese input).

Coupled with its vibrating haptic feedback system, touch based input on the 5800 is a joy. It does lag slightly from time to time (one of the major hurdles of software based input), but it’s otherwise acceptable enough for blind one handed typing at my “normal-average” speeds.

What else do we have on the fascia? There’s the earpiece hole up top , next to which we have the iPhone-esque contact sensor (blanks out the screen to any touch when you put the phone to your ear) and 3G secondary camera (with the Media Bar button – yes, that’s a button – right below it).

Now, moving on to the left side of the 5800, we find the plastic covered access slots for the microSD card and also the SIM card, and the hole for the lanyard.

On the right side, we have the volume controls (sadly bound to control VOLUME ONLY, could’ve done well as scroll buttons OR track change on hold like on the W810i), the camera button and – in what is probably Nokia’s few “true” strokes of genius – the wonderful keyguard switch nestled right in between.

The keyguard switch (I like to call it the ”lock-slider”) brings new meaning to the phrase “slide to unlock”, and even though it’s not without its flaws (sometimes I have to slide it a few times to unlock the screen), the action of picking up your phone while sliding the lock has quickly become an automatic reflex.

Bye bye, “press menu key and then press * to unlock” or the variations thereof.

The top of the 5800 is occupied by the power button, the AC charger port, and 3.5 inch (a standard port, thank you Nokia!) audio jack cum TV-Out connector and the microUSB port (that doesn’t charge, boo).

On the very sparse bottom is the mic opening and… not really anything else.

On the backside of the 5800, we have the camera module up top: a Carl Zeiss optic equipped 3.2MP module with Auto Focus – the normal fare, nothing exceptional (more on that later). Down on the bottom we have the plastic stylus snug in its silo.

Ergonomically, everything is where it’s supposed to be, even if the left side could be more properly used up (Scroll key? Gallery key? Anything I can map later to something else). But other than that, I have found that the 5800 is generally sound in terms of ergonomics.

Build quality wise, this ain’t no E-series, so it’s a full on plastic fantastic and nearly everything is made out of ABS plastic. Even so, it is built well with only a few creaks or gaps, and it generally feels solid in my hands.

Of the parts that do creak, there is one creaking section on the front fascia (left bottom side) that drives me mad. Sadly, this seems to be a common enough occurrence amongst 5800 users (in Malaysia at least, as observed from the Lowyat.net Forum’s 5800 thread). Some users have also reported light leakages on the front fascia (particularly around the Trio buttons on the bottom of the fascia), but in my particular sample everything’s fine. There is also the famous problem with the earpiece, where the earpiece volume fluctuates from low to inaudible randomly; again, my own sample seems free of this problem and it will also be readily repaired at your nearest Nokia Care Centre if it ever happens to you.

In retrospect, the 5800 is as well built (even better in some aspects) as my old W810i, although the generally smooth plastic used on the 5800 is far inferior to the textured plastic used on the W810i in terms of slippage and tactile feel.

In my old W810i review, I did mention how a “drop test” would be the paramount test of build quality? Well, the 5800 definitely passes this, as my friend dropped his the other day and it survived the ordeal fine. There are even more torturous tests done on the 5800 (which it survived, generally), which a quick Google search would easily uncover.

THREE MONTHS LATER: This thing is better built then it feels like in the beginning. It has survived more drops (covered in a case of some sort most of the time) then I would have liked to count, although the screen (particularly on the lower left side) has developed some creaking tendencies when pressed. The Full Screen QWERTY keyboard is much less useful then first anticipated, much more so with the lack of predictive input of any kind. Alphanumeric + T9 is far slicker in comparison. The lack of hardware keys are still noticeable and the creaks less so. I sent the 5800 for repairs on the earpiece out of paranoia (without it ever going crazy in the first place) and it’s now working fine, no problem.

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