Nokia 5530 XpressMusic review

With the new Nokia Xseries devices, Nokia music phones are gradually evolving. And with the upcoming Xseries range, more cool new features are on the way for music aficionados - also the all singing, all dancing X6 is coming soon.

Undoubtedly, there's still life in the XpressMusic range yet - and while the X6 takes things a step up, the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic brings the touchscreen music device down to the masses. Sadly, someone took the words 'cut cost' a little too literally at the design stage, coming up with something that looks rather cheap.

If this is aimed at a younger market that are cost conscious, but still need to be seen with something trendy, then Nokia may have scored a bit of an own-goal, with cheap plastic standing out from the poor attempt to give it a premium look with a silver surround.

The sliding keylock button looks like it fall off just by sneezing on it - although fortunately looks can be deceiving and despite low cost materials, it does actually feel quite solid.

The Nokia 5530 XpressMusic sports a stainless steel frame finish. Other than the metal finish look, the key features of of this music phone include Media bar and contacts bar, 27 hrs of music playback (via headphones) and a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash.

Built on the same platform as that of Nokia 5800, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic is upgraded with the option of customising 20 contacts as compared to Nokia 5800, which earlier allowed only four contacts option.

The phone is also equipped with a stylus, like the original 5800. It’s probably more necessary here too, as the screen is smaller, which is a shame because it’s something to break, lose or stop you using the phone easily with one hand.

The resistive screen works surprisingly well though, meaning you can use your fingers for most of the applications - it's the option screens that can cause a bit more trouble as you try and navigate them.

For the everyday task of dialling numbers on the full-screen keypad, or entering numbers and text via the (landscape) QWERTY keyboard, we had no problems at all.

You could almost be excused for thinking it has a capacitive touchsceen, but it certainly is not - and if you don't ensure the screen is locked when you put the phone in your pocket, you may find yourself doing all sorts of things you don't want.

Whereas the 5800 came with integrated GPS, 3G and an 8GB memory card, Nokia has removed both GPS and 3G and shipped the 5530 with a 4GB memory card. Of course, you can invest in an larger card at any time, and the 5530 supports cards up to 32GB.

Nokia has also kept the almost hidden XpressMusic key that sits just above the top righthand side of the screen - giving you easy access to key tasks, including the music player and your messages.

If you decide to get this with the Comes With Music service, giving a year of completely unlimited and unrestricted music downloads, this is a much cheaper offering than the 5800 - and ideal if you're not really that bothered about getting on the Internet at full speed or using any type of navigation software.

You can of course install Google Maps and use cell-based location for an approximation of your location, which is still fine for finding out where you are.

Without 3G, the only way of getting a fast data connection is with Wi-Fi - a possibly unexpected feature of a relatively low-end model. This means you can set up sharing on a PC and access music, pictures and video from the phone. You can also send content from the phone the other way.

A simple wizard guides you through the setup process, although we found it a little on the slow side. This feature has been on many Series 60 devices for some time and has never really proved to be much more than a gimmick. Our advice is to buy a larger memory card and store the content on the phone in the first place.

On the imaging side, the phone comes with the Nokia 5800's 3.2 megapixel camera and flash - and it can also record video at VGA (640x480 pixels). Okay, so it doesn’t have a keyboard or the 5 megapixel camera from the N97, but there's not much else that is different in terms of the capabilities of the operating system.

There's the latest Nokia email client and support for the official Facebook application, although compared to the BlackBerry or iPhone versions, Nokia's one is only a small step up from using the mobile website.

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