Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Although it’s hard to empathise with faceless multinational corporations, you can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for Nokia.

Having arguably done more to further the standing of the humble mobile phone over the past few decades than any other company, the Finnish manufacturer has been somewhat upstaged by the iPhone.

Like a muscle-bound bully kicking sand in the face of a bumbling weakling, Apple’s device has smashed into the public consciousness and left industry stalwart Nokia looking distinctly unfashionable as a result.

But when you control almost 40 per cent of the global mobile phone industry, you don’t take this kind of affront sitting down. It’s taken the firm longer than expected but Nokia has finally produced touchscreen mobile in the form of the 5800 XpressMusic (affectionately known by fans as its pre-production codename ‘Tube’).

Placing the two rival phones side-by-side proves that while Nokia is arguably playing ‘catch up’ with this product, there’s still enough imagination present to make the 5800 so much more than a lazy imitation.

For starters, massive display notwithstanding, it’s almost impossible to conceive how the 5800 could look any more different from the iPhone. Although its front is thinner, it’s visibly chunkier in terms of depth.

Also, while Apple’s vanguard product is a triumph of tempered glass and sleek metal casing, the 5800 is predominantly plastic, with a dark brown hue to the bodywork that harks back to the faux-wood interiors of cars from the ‘70s.

It’s not an ugly phone by any stretch of the imagination, and we have to admit that after a few hours in its company we started to take quite a shine to its aesthetic qualities, but if the iPhone is the flawless catwalk model, then the 5800 possesses a more ‘down to earth’ beauty that isn’t instantly appreciated.

Before we investigate the touchscreen elements of the phone, there are few design choices that bear mentioning.

Firstly, we were surprised to see that inserting your SIM card doesn’t require the traditional removal of the battery; nestled on the left-hand side of the unit are two slots – one for your SIM and the other for you memory card (an 8GB variant was included with our test unit).

The right-hand side of the phone features the usual selection of volume and photographic controls, but also a sliding mechanism that allows you to almost effortlessly lock and unlock the handset.

For those of you raised on the Nokia principle of pressing ‘*’ and then ‘unlock’ to gain access to your phone will possibly be irked by this jarring fracture from tradition, but everyone else should be mightily pleased with this intuitive concept (even if it’s previously been seen on vintage phones such as the Sony Ericsson W550).

Another welcome feature - which is now thankfully a common sight on Nokia’s music-centric devices - is the inclusion of an industry-standard 3.5mm as opposed to a proprietary input.

It’s located at the top of the phone, which initially seems a little awkward, but as soon as you secrete the 5800 on your person it instantly becomes obvious why this is the case - headphone cables no longer get snagged and wrapped around the contents of your pocket.

All of these little elements prove that Nokia is deadly serious about creating a crowd-pleasing mobile, but sadly the 5800 fails to trump the iPhone in the one area that is possibly the most important - the all-important touchscreen functionality.

Like other pretenders to Apple’s crown such as the LG Renoir and the Samsung Tocco, the 5800 utilizes a pressure-sensitive ‘resistive’ display, whereas the iPhone showcases ‘capacitive’ technology, which requires skin-to-screen contact but it generally regarded as more responsive as no pressure is needed in order to register input.

While the 5800’s resistive display is far more responsive than the aforementioned rival handsets (in fact at one point we were almost convinced it used the same tech as Apple’s phone, such was the uncanny accuracy), it’s definitely not in the same league as the iPhone.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the 5800’s operating system is firmly entrenched in the past and fails to offer the same appealing experience as that seen on Apple’s all-conquering product.

The user interface is the latest version of the Symbian platform, and while its highly customizable nature will please fans of smartphones, it merely feels like a standard menu system with touchscreen control tacked on.

Moving on from this mild disappointment, other elements of the 5800 restore that warm feeling of affection. For example, there’s the one-touch ‘Media key’ permits instant access to photos, music and video. Built-in wi-fi means fast data transfer, and pre-loaded programs such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer make good use of both this and the nippy 3G connection.

There’s even a stylus (docked neatly onto the rear panel) which grants more accurate touchscreen control and even allows the phone to recognize your handwriting.

However, despite the presense of all these neat elements, most prospective owners of the 5800 will be keen to know if the device is scheduled to make use of Nokia's new (and much-hyped) 'Comes with Music' service.

At the time of writing Nokia is yet to confirm the availablity of 5800 'Comes with music' editions, but we'd be willing to bet that such a bundle will appear eventually. When it does, users will be granted a year's free access to the Nokia music store with unlimited downloads - the only caveat in the case of the 5800 is that the included 8GB memory is likely to fill up pretty swiftly.

Scanning the feature list, it really does appear that Nokia has thought of everything. However, one element is conspicuously absent – N-Gage.

As you will no doubt recall, some time ago we voiced our concerns over the 5800’s seeming disinterest in the pastime of mobile video gaming. Nokia has since confirmed that N-Gage capability is in the pipeline, but we can’t help but feel it’s missed the boat here.

If the company is solemn about positioning the 5800 as a serious rival to the iPhone then it really should have made sure that it possessed N-Gage compatibility from day one - it’s not as if the service isn’t already up and running, after all.

How gaming will operate beyond accelerometer-control is another matter to consider – while other N-Gage enabled handsets boast dedicated gaming controls, the 5800 lacks such a feature, which could prove problematic when it comes to porting the entire N-Gage experience to the phone.

Still, the bundled games give a glimpse of how entertaining the phone could be - the colourful 3D platform title Bounce is excellent and puts most Nintendo DS titles to shame in terms of visual quality.

After spending a considerable amount of time tinkering with the 5800, it deserves to do well at retail but isn’t likely to dethrone the iPhone any time soon. Nokia has put an awful lot of thought into this product and it shows, but a few elements are less than perfect and that holds the phone back a little.