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There are getting more and more mobile phone makers entry into the touchscreen phone space after the success of Apple iphone. We have seen the Motorola has its Motorola Krave ZN4, Sony Ericsson has Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1, and the worlds number one phone maker, Nokia has just released its touchscreen mobile phone-Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic also known as Tube, which is is the first production device to run S60 5th Edition. Let’s see what are the special about this device.

Design
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic measuring 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm, is a narrow but fat device. However, the phone is roughly the size of the HTC Diamond,and considerably smaller than both the iPhone, and Samsung Omnia. The device has a large 3,2“, bright nHD (640 x 360 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio) ,resistive touch screen and tactile feedback color display. The device has variety of input methods: stylus, plectrum and finger touch support for text input and UI control (alphanumeric keypad, full and mini qwerty keyboard, handwriting recognition). Note that There’s a tiny self-portrait camera above the display, along with a quick-action button that pops up a menu of the most-frequently used applications. At the bottom of the screen there are three keys: a send key (green), a home key and an end key (red).

The back of the device has a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics and an accompanying dual LED flash.On the side are volume and camera controls, a lock switch, and a MicroSD card slot.

Software
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic can either be used two handed (stylus or finger touch) or one handed (with finger touch), thanks for the S60 5th Edition OS. Also it is important to realise that S60 5th Edition really is the enabling of touch interaction for the existing S60 UI. Within the traditional Symbian Series 60 menu system, you’ll find the typical reliable apps, such as the GPS-powered Nokia Maps, an FM radio, a podcasting client, and both POP/IMAP and Microsoft Exchange mail clients.

What’s new is a touch-sensitive button above the screen that drops down the Media Bar for access to music, movies, photos, the browser and sharing. Not life changing, but quite convenient. There’s also a new home screen with a “Fav Four” of sorts across the top and little else. Tap that friend, and you can get a quick look at recent calls, messages and even related RSS feeds. Pretty neat if you’re a loner, but there’s no way to add more than four friends, or view similar info for your regular contacts that don’t make the cut. Luckily, the traditional S60 home screen is also available.

However, in its first touch-screen handset, Nokia didn’t get a lot right. If you have a touch screen–only device, your navigation gestures (swiping, zooming, and dragging) need to work perfectly. Some touch-screen gadgets hedge their bets by including a track-ball or cursor pad. Nokia puts all its chips on the 5800’s touch screen, and it’s a bad bet. Fortunately, the phone is built at around a speedy 377Mhz ARM9 processor, the phone feels fast.

Multimedia
Apart of the touchscreen, we also not to forget the Nokia 5800 Tube is from XpressMusic series. The 5800 maintains Nokia’s reputation for creating powerful and feature-rich multimedia mobile devices. With its XpressMusic moniker, it’ll be no surprise that the 5800 is an extremely capable music device. There are strong music features to go with Comes with Music - a graphic equaliser, and a 3.5mm jack and support for all the main digital formats. The stereo speakers are able to output a surprising high volume, though the sound quality is best at half-volume. Sound quality is very good, though, as ever, you’ll need to replace the in-box headphones to make the most of it.

Ensuring a seamless music experience,Nokia’s groundbreaking service which offers one year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue and the 5800 Tube provides one-touch access to browse and purchase tracks from the store.

For video playback there’s Real player, which does a good job; it’ll happily play videos, either locally or via streams, either directly or those that are passed to it by other applications. It supports a wide array of formats including H.263 and H.264 codecs (3gp/mp4), wmv and flv, and is not as fussy about access points, resolution or bit rates as previous versions. The 5800’s large, high resolution screen makes for an excellent video playback experience and, coupled with Real player, there’s a lot of potential here.

Camera
The 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash is middling at best. Most of the shots I took were blurry, grainy, or noisy. I had a far better experience capturing video, which was recorded in a widescreen, 640-by-352 format at 30 frames per second. Video does show some visible compression artifacts, but it looks a lot better than what you get on a typical camera phone.

An area where the 5800 impresses is its ability to easily upload captured media to online services (Flickr, Share on Ovi and more) through the Share online application. Both the Gallery and Camera applications integrate with the Share online application via the send shortcut (web upload). In the case of the camera, this means you can capture media and be uploading it to the web just a handful of seconds later. The Share online application does a great deal more too, you can use it to view images your contacts have themselves recently uploaded to the sharing sites and read or add comments to them. While the functionality is broadly the same as earlier versions, the bigger screen size and touch interaction makes it less fiddly to use.

Connectivity
Use the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to connect to mobile broadband using WLAN or HSDPA (3.5G). The phone supported WCDMA frequencies depend on the region where the device is available. The GPRS and EDGE can be use for internet connection when 3G and WLAN is unavailable. As for find directions and locations, there are integrated A-GPS and included maps powered Nokia Maps.

Last Words
We were surprised by the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic at the first glance. No doubt it has a great design and features. For Nokia’s first attempt at a touchscreen, this was pretty impressive. However, It is still can’t compete with iphone nor HTC G1. Nokia still has a way to go. But Nokia has the great potential to grow its touchscreen line phone. So we can’t wait to see its next touchscreen device. Perhaps the touch-enabled Nseries devices that are on the way will provide an even stronger response.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (Tube) Specification, Images and Video Review