Tuesday, December 25, 2007

N0kia 57OO XpressMusic

Most cell phones these days are capable of playing music. Even a barebones music player will do the most common music formats. For most people, Sony Ericsson's Walkman series may be the first to mind when they're looking for a musically talented handset, but Nokia has come a long way, too, with its multimedia-enabled N-series handhelds. Then again, not everyone will need a "multimedia computer". So there's the XpressMusic range to cater to this music-loving crowd.
Design
There's nothing cutting edge about the design of the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic. It does stand out, but not because it's an ultraslim model. We have to qualify that the 5700 isn't chunky. It has a nice heft in hand and against our ear. It's like you can actually feel you're holding something substantial in your hands, but not to the extent that it's heavy or bulky. In short, it's a nice balance of size and weight.

To set it apart from the competition, the 5700 offers a 270-degree twist motion on the bottom half of the device where the numeric keypad is. A 90-degree twist (either toward or away from you) will activate the camera, while a 180-degree turn will activate the music player and, along with it, dedicated external multimedia keys for playback, pause, fast forward and rewind. The keypad itself has large buttons providing tactile feedback that we've come to adore.


The 5700 offers a 270-degree twist motion on the bottom half of the device where the numeric keypad is.

It's amusing to see how some of our friends' faces lit up when they thought we were attempting to break the phone by doing the whole twisting motion. But the really useful part of this design is we don't actually have to dive into the phone's menu to activate the camera or music player, which saves us a few clicks.

However, the design is not without flaws. For instance, in camera mode, we have to use the joystick to navigate the shooting options. With the keypad forming a right-angle with the top half of the phone, it can get rather cramped when reaching for the joystick. Switching between the applications isn't instantaneous. No fault with that since it's the same if we were to activate the programs via the phone menu as well.

There's another thing which we want to point out on this Nokia. Because the Menu and Cancel keys are on the rubberized edges of the phone flanking the 2.2-inch QVGA LCD, the buttons won't light up like the rest of the keypad. For example, if you're typing a message in the dark and need to cancel some misspelt characters, you will be feeling for the key instead of knowing exactly where it is.





Features
Like its name suggests, the 5700 XpressMusic excels in musical talents. It supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA formats. It also comes with a pair of onboard speakers which are on diagonally opposite ends when the phone is in the default position. If we swing the keypad 180 degrees to activate the music player, the speakers will be aligned on the same side of the handset. The device comes with the Music Manager software in the bundled CD, but more often than not we found ourselves dragging-and-dropping our tracks onto a microSD/TransFlash card (up to 2GB).

Unlike the earlier twist-phone, the Nokia 3250, which required the user to twist the keypad into camera mode to find the card slot underneath the Talk key, the microSD card slot on the 5700 is hot-swappable on the right edge of the phone behind a rubber cover. The mini-USB and charging ports are also found at the same location. Because we cannot test the unit over a long period of time, we can't comment on whether the rubber cover will stand the test of time.

Other multimedia features on the 5700 XpressMusic include an FM radio, voice recorder, 2-megapixel camera, RealPlayer and Flash Player programs. The phone runs on the robust Series 60 platform and that opens up opportunities to download quite a number of free applications from Nokia's Web site to personalize the phone. The 5700 doesn't come preinstalled with document viewing programs but we figured that didn't really matter since it's a music phone anyway.

Connectivity-wise, the 5700 is actually pretty well-equipped. The quadband (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) Nokia is also 3G-enabled (WCDMA 2100 MHz). It supports Bluetooth stereo, something we expect no less for a music phone, so we could use our favorite wireless headphones. The only quibble we have with here is the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack. Instead, we had to use the bundled 2.5mm headset cable to connect to our 3.5mm earbuds. That didn't go down too well since it's not an ultraslim phone that doesn't have enough real estate to accommodate a 3.5mm connector.

Performance
We tested the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic in Singapore with the MobileOne network. Calls sounded loud and clear even when we were in a noisy environment.

Music playback via the onboard speakers was sufficiently loud but not fantastic. When we switched to the stock earphones at the default equalizer setting, music sounded a little flat and lacked bass. Changing the equalizer to Pop produced a much better audio quality though it's still less dynamic than we would have liked it to be. As a music player, the 5700 gave us acceptable but not exceptional sound quality. We recommend you ditch the bundled earbuds for better-quality ones.

We ran a test on music playback only, while the phone was in online mode. The battery at full charge was able to play music for 8 hours, with two bars of battery life remaining. Volume was fixed at 70 percent and we used our Etymotic ER6 earphones for testing.

Image quality, again, was nothing impressive and had the same artifacts that plagued the average camera-phones--purple fringing, lack of saturation and soft while night shots without flash were practically unusuable. There's no autofocus on the 2-megapixel camera and a 1-second shutter lag, so you'll have to hold the phone steady even after pressing the joystick to take the picture. The LCD viewfinder works all right though it tends to wash out a little under harsh lighting.

The 5700 has a rated talktime of up to 3.5 hours and a maximum standby time of 12 days. In actual use, the 900mAh battery lasted for about 2.5 days with music playback for about an hour each day.

Price

http://www.vatgia.com/home/quicksearch.php?keyword=Nokia+5700&view=search

http://www.vatgia.com/home/detail.php?module=product&iPro=39088&iCat=438

No comments: