Nokia 5800 Xpress Music mobile phone

Touch is the latest trend in mobile phones; popularised by Apple, just about everyone has brought out new devices recently ­ with the exception of Nokia.

That’s now been rectified with the 5800 Xpress Music. At £250 without a contract, and free with many, it’s not perhaps targeted directly at the iPhone, but many will doubtless compare the two.

The 5800 is chunkier, but not excessively large; it slips nicely inside the pocket and feels fairly robust, even though it has a plastic case.

A small lip around the screen sets the look apart from the iPhone, as does the collection of three physical buttons just below it; green and red call and end keys flank a white menu button, which gives access to the main menu screen that will be familiar to anyone who has used a Symbian device before.

Above the screen there’s small Xpress Music icon, which also responds to touch, and the front camera. The top of the case has power and USB sockets, together with the power switch, while the left has flaps covering SIM and MicroSD slots; on the right there’s a slider that locks and unlocks the screen. On the rear is a camera, though it needs good lighting to get decent results. The screen rotates as you turn the phone ­ turning it face down will mute incoming calls or alarms.

On the whole, the interface works fairly well. If you’re used to current Nokia smartphones, there are no surprises; the 5800 uses Series 60 fifth edition. Most elements of the screen can be tapped to select things, so tapping the clock on the home screen opens the app, and allows you to set an alarm. Tapping on the network name opens the profile list, and allows you to go to the calendar. The Xpress Music icon on the front panel gives quick access to media functions. But we had some niggles; on tabbed dialogues, it’s a bit fiddly at times to move from one tab to the next.

Nokia uses a resistive touchscreen so there’s none of the multitouch functionality found on other devices. You can scroll by dragging a finger, but for things such as zooming, you’ll have to call up a menu or double-tap in the browser. That said, it’s still pretty easy to use.

Dialling a number is straightforward; tap one of two icons on the home screen to open the keypad, or the other to go to the address book. Scroll and pick a name, or tap in the blank space, and you can then press the first letter on an on-screen keypad, narrowing down subsequent choices.

For text entry, there’s a choice of an alphanumeric keypad on screen, with Nokia’s predictive text, a small Qwerty one ­ which really needs you to use the stylus ­ or a full-screen Qwerty, which works in landscape mode; turning the phone doesn’t switch between small and full screen keyboards, annoyingly. There’s also handwriting recognition, which we found worked reasonably well.

Around the rest of the phone, it’s standard Nokia smartphone fare ­ the browser is adequate and media playback is good ­ the screen is excellent. The fifth edition of Symbian S60 tidies a few things up; icons get a new look, and though the mail application still lacks really good Imap support, it does make it easy to hide older messages. You will probably need to update your favourite apps ­ none of ours would install. In normal use, we got three days between charges.

As a mid-market touchscreen phone, the 5800 is pretty good; it’s not excellent, but it’s far more than a simple grafting of a touchscreen onto Nokia’s existing smartphones ­ definitely worth a look.

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