It seems that music phones are becoming an increasingly important part of every company's portfolio. It's therefore no surprise that a lot of effort is put in developing such devices, which explains the constantly improving functionality and performance. We'll now have a look at Nokia's most recent creation in the genre - the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic family. Just a quick glance at its features tells you this phone is promising, to say the least. But practice has taught us that features are not all that a handset is about. Stay with us as we find out what this heavyweight musician is capable of.
Key features:
* Fast and responsive user interface
* Excellent display, with unmatched legibility under direct sunlight
* Great earphones
* Symbian S60 3rd edition FP1
* Sporty, youthful design
* The swiveling part is well-built and very functional
Main disadvantages:
* Awkward joystick
* Weak bass
* Bizarre Menu and C keys
* No Pencil key
* No built-in 3.5mm jack
Nokia 5700 went off to a flying start with its very release, earning itself quite a number of fans. Smartphone functionality topped with music phone charisma was sure to appeal to all walks of life. Although its design was originally meant to mostly please the young, Nokia 5700's curvy lines and lacquered plastic are enjoyed by men and women of all ages.
We started this review with a couple of questions on our mind, and we put the phone to the test looking for the answers. First and more important, we were wondering which one gained the upper hand in Nokia 5700 - music phone or smartphone. And secondly we wanted to know what had changed in the music lineup since the Nokia 3250 release. Answering the first one was going to involve a lot of digging, while the other didn't need this much of an effort. Only a quick glance at both handsets' specs was enough to convince us that Nokia had not been wasting their time. The display is now bigger and offers QVGA resolution and 16M colors. Connectivity has undergone a major improvement, with 3G support added. All that, plus shedding a good 15g of weight, clearly shows that Nokia 5700 and Nokia 3250 are two phones that simply do not belong to the same class.
The box
The retail package we got the phone with was quite well equipped. Alongside a 1 GB microSD memory card, there's a wired remote serving as an adapter for plugging the included 3.5mm earphones into the phone's 2.5 mm jack. The earphones turned out quite a pleasant surprise, but we'll come back to that later when we look at the music capabilities of the handset. The other package contents included an adapter for the microSD card (making it compatible with standard SD card-readers) plus a USB cable. Of course a DC charger was also present and, to our greatest pleasure, we found out that this phone was using the latest Nokia AC-5 charger. It's the most compact and yet best performing among its Nokia siblings. A CD with the required software for synchronizing your phone with a PC, a manual and a booklet highlighting the Nokia 5700 most important features complete the box contents. Most of these of course are strictly market-dependant, so we cannot guarantee that everyone will get the same bunch of extras that we did.
Revolver Action
The phone comes in three different color versions including Red, Gray and Black but with all of them the rotating part and the top part are finished in very nice looking lacquered white plastic. It looks very durable and blends well with all the different color versions of the rubber sides and the plastic battery cover. We received the black version for testing and we have to admit we liked that color combo very much.
We are more than pleased with the construction of the 5700. The casing didn't produce any creaks during our test, and it didn't seem likely to start playing up after a few months of use. The phone is also very comfortable to hold, the rubber sides provide for a great grip.
In terms of size Nokia 5700 is a little bit above the average. It is bigger than common phones (108 x 50 x 17 mm), but not as heavy as you would've guessed from the numbers. It weighs exactly 115 grams. And, a real nicety: the phone is fingerprint proof with even the shiny plastic surfaces very hard to blotch during normal operation. In other words, cleaning is no issue for 5700 owners.
Going over the phone, you couldn't help but notice the ambient light detector in the upper right corner of the front panel. These sensors have become quite common among Nokia phones since Nokia 6630. They are very handy indeed. The sensor detects the available light and controls the display brightness. It thus acts as a power optimizer and provides less brightness in darker conditions so that it doesn't go hard on your eyes. Next to the sensor, right in the center, is the earpiece.
Right above it, on the top of the phone, is the On/Off key - it's made of the same white plastic as the surrounding surface, fully flat and blending perfectly. This makes it a little less tactile, but we guess it will only take a while getting used to. In terms of functionality there is almost no change. It is responsible for switching the phone on and off, changing profiles, locking the keypad or the phone, and activating offline mode.
The left side of the device features two volume keys as well as a speaker grill right at its top. Depending on the swivel position, either the second speaker grill or the camera and the LED flash are found in the lower end of the left side. None of these needs going into much detail regarding functionality. The volume keys are tiny knobs in the rubber part of Nokia 5700. Despite that, they are very easily felt by fingertips and therefore no problem to use without looking at the phone. They do require a stronger press however but it prevents accidental keypresses when the phone is in your pocket. The loudspeakers position is well-thought of, as the sound doesn't get muffled when you put down the handset on its back, as with some other mobile phones. In all honesty, we should admit that positioning them on both sides of the display like in Nokia N95 is probably better. Nokia's flagship makes great use of its loudspeaker layout as the speakers are not covered by your fingers when you hold the handset.
The bottom side is pretty plain. It hosts the eyelet for a attaching a neck or a wrist strap. Right above it is the 2.5mm audio jack. The microphone pinhole is the last thing to find there. The lack of a built-in 3.5 mm audio jack is a serious flaw having in mind that Nokia 5700 is supposed to be a music phone. This is partially resolved by the included remote, which acts as an adapter too. This of course means that you should carry it with you at all times, and we personally are not very excited about this.
The right side of the phone is where the Infrared port is placed. Right below it there are three openings under a plastic cover. The cover fits in very tightly and we find it very unlikely to go loose and open by itself even if not treated with enough care. Under the cap are the charger plug, the USB port and the memory card slot. Unfortunately the cover is not active, so when removing the memory card you will have to go to the on/off button menu and select remove memory card. Otherwise there is certain risk of loosing data. The plastic cover itself goes well with the design of the phone without doing wrong to its looks despite being quite large.
The largest part of the back is taken by the battery cover. Right in its middle the Nokia and XpressMusic logos are etched. The lower part is taken by the other face of the rotating keypad.
Getting to the battery is not as simple as usual. The first time you open the back cover you can lift it using the plastic tag on the back of the phone. Then you can remove the tag and procede releasing the battery cover by rotating the swivel to 90 degrees and using the gaps under it. Removing the battery itself is also not as easy as some other phones, especially if you have larger fingers and not long enough fingernails. On the other hand, this is not something a regular user needs to do very often, so it's not going to spoil the user experience of the phone. Under the battery lies the SIM card slot that has a lock mechanism that should be used, once a SIM card is inserted.
Of course the main highlight in the phone's design is the swiveling part, which takes up the lower third of the device. Although not new, let alone revolutionary, it deserves a couple of words. Nice words that is, as we think that designers have done a great job with it. The numeric keypad is one of the most comfortable we have worked with. It has terraced keys of sufficient size and tactility to make typing and dialing a piece of cake. When you rotate it at 90 degrees in any direction the camera is automatically activated. It does wait for a second or two before the screen actually turns into a viewfinder but that is because the phone expects to see if the user will do a full 180 degrees rotation. This 90 degrees rotation can be used if you want to take a picture of yourself or of something standing in front of you. When a full 180 degrees rotation is performed the dedicated music keys are positioned under the display, the music player is automatically activated and displayed on the screen. Then you can change tracks with the dedicated music keys. An obvious minus here is the lack of a dedicated stop key, although one is present in the player. You can use the joystick instead, but then one might ask what the purpose of the dedicated keys is if not to operate the player. There is one extra function of the swivel. When watching a video you can rotate the swivel at 90 degrees and position the phone on its side. Upon doing this the video player automatically goes into fullscreen landscape mode to ensure better viewing experience. This works the same way with the image gallery too. Overall, the swivel is very sturdy and rotating produces distinct clicks when it locks into position. There are hardly any chances of it coming loose with time.
Finally we come to the part of the keypad that is not on the swivel - right below the display the two soft keys are located -their functionality varies according to the phone's current state. The Call and End keys are right below them. The Menu and Clear keys are located on the sides of each of these. We did experience some troubles as we tended to press the captions instead of the buttons for the first few days of dealing with this phone. Some members of our team tended to press the Menu and the Left selection key simultaneously, but that is not a major concern and only takes a while getting used to.
Dead center on the D-pad is the Joystick. Now, this is where this phone really lacks in user-friendliness. Having worked with all kinds of navigation solutions, and a lot of joysticks in particular, we can hardly think of any to have behaved as badly as this one. It really does seem to have a mind of its own and ever too often pressing it to the right requires three or four attempts for example. Pushing upways more than often led to pressing the confirming center. This is the probably the biggest letdown of the 5700 keypad. Still, we believe that it will be appreciated by all, except for the QWERTY freaks.
The even white backlighting of the keypad is strong enough and ensures great usability in dark environments. The display is also quite visible thanks to the ambient light sensor.
Pure quality
The display in Nokia 5700 may not be oversized, but with its 2.2" diagonal it is on the right side of big in its class. Moreover it is one of exceptional quality and with its 16M colors and QVGA resolution provides fine and smooth graphics. The emphasis here is its legibility under direct sunlight. When exposed to even the brightest sunlight, Nokia 5700 is doing an incredible job up to the highest Finnish standards. We have been repeatedly mentioning Nokia's hybrid electronic displays consisting both light emissive and light reflective elements in our reviews. Nokia 5700 is another step ahead of the competition in this seemingly one-horse race.
A phone is a phone
Nokia 5700 signal reception is just what you would expect from a Nokia smartphone - flawless. The loudspeaker of the phone is also good, and as we already mentioned - due to its position it is hard to muffle it in your pocket or when you put it on a table. Ringtone volume is loud enough and is audible even in crowded places. The vibration of the phone is as strong as you would have hoped, so missing a call, even in very noisy environments is not an option. The phone has brilliant speaker quality and the sound during calls is very clear and without any interferences.
Smart to the bone
The heart of Nokia 5700 is its Symbian 9.2 OS. It uses the well known S60 3rd edition graphic user interface. Beside, Nokia has improved it by adding Feature Pack 1, which we first experienced in the high-class N95. The strongest advantage of Feature Pack 1 is its repeated alarm clock and the fact that its voice recorder is not limited to a miserly minute and allows hour-long recordings and quality customization.
We find the blue circle displayed on running applications' icons in the menus useful, as it reminds you to turn off applications you do not use anymore to save some RAM. A thing we ought to mention here is regarding the phone's speed. Armed with Nokia's fastest processor, this phone is truly as fast as you can possibly demand a smartphone to be. The menus open in an instant and any command is executed in a blink of an eye. Not even the N95 is that well performing in terms of speed.
The display naturally features an active stand-by mode. You have a band with icons for instant access to pre-selected functions at the top of the display and scheduled events from the calendar together with tasks in its bottom. When selecting the shortcuts you can choose any application or even a website. The two softkeys' functionality is also configurable. The left one however will wait about a second before executing your command. The reason for this is the standard keylock pattern of left selection key and asterisk. So when you press the left key the phone will wait to see if a lock command is to follow. This handset, like many of its Symbian siblings, does not support keypad autolock. In the bottom area of the display you will also find the title of a running song or the name of the tuned radio station.
The phone has an Offline mode, switching off transceivers but allowing the use of the other capabilities of the device. It is also used if you start the handset without a SIM card. The radio is not available in Offline mode. Other functions, such as Bluetooth connectivity and music player are usable though.
As with any smartphone, a Task Manager is present. It is launched by a longer press on the Menu key on the keyboard. This pop-up allows switching between applications and you can shut any application down by pressing the Clear key. Generally, the red End key does not close an application, but just minimizes it and it keeps running in the background, so unless you leave applications by pressing the exit key or use the task manager for closing them, you might end up with a lot of applications running and eating up your precious RAM. Luckily, the phone has enough RAM so a few minor applications will not slow it down at all.
The phone's main menu has four different view modes. The first two are the well known grid of 4 x 3 icons and the list view. There are also two additional looks brought in by the Feature Pack 1. Same as in Nokia N76, there is a V-shape and a Horseshoe mode. Both are 3D and look quite nice but are very hard to use. Navigation in any of them kills the joy of navigating the phone. Most of the submenus also allow changing the type of view. We have already mentioned that navigating the menus is amazingly fast with instant response to keypresses and no delays.
Nokia 5700 has 38 MB of internal memory, expandable through the already mentioned microSD memory card. Luckily, the retail package of the 5700 will be including a memory card of quite ample size (1GB in our case). This is a smart move by Nokia, which benefits the phone's musical image as there is enough memory for all your favorite songs without extra spending.
As with all recent Symbian smartphones, a great feature of Nokia 5700 is the voice recognition system, which can be used both for dialing contacts and starting applications. It is not voice dependent as it doesn't need to have your commands pre-recorded. It handles most of the voice commands you give it but still its performance in that area doesn't go anywhere near Nokia N95. The voice recognition of the latter is still unrivaled.
Color all around
There are 6 preinstalled themes in Nokia 5700, which is a respectable count compared to most other Finnish models. Along with the standard Nokia theme, there are 5 others, which all have names related to music, a reiteration of the phone's music image.
The five predefined ringing profiles (six if you count the Offline mode) are no news when talking about Symbian. They are probably enough to deal with almost any situation a regular user may have to deal with. Should you need more, creating a new profile or modifying a currently existing one is only matter of a few seconds.
Phonebook... sky is the limit
The phonebook of Nokia 5700 is just like a normal Nokia Symbian phonebook. It has no limit of the contacts, as it uses the phone's free memory and can thus hold an enormous amount of entries. They can be ordered either by first or last name and can be searched by letter-by-letter typing of the desired name. The phonebook can be accessed by the joystick in stand-by mode or from the main menu.
An unlimited number of fields can be assigned to any new or existing contact. You can add each field as many times as you like, which gives you the option of assigning 3 or 4 mobiles to a single contact, for example. Editing a field's name is also allowed if you would like to assign a field that does not already exist. Naturally, you can assign ringtones and pictures to contacts of your choice, and in this case even a personal video clip can be attached. Synchronization with PC works seamlessly, too.
Nokia 5700 Nokia 5700
Editing a contact: should the enormous number of different fields prove insufficient, you can create your own
The Calls log of Nokia 5700 contains three tabs for Dialed, Received and Missed calls. Every tab can hold up to 20 call records with their date and time. However, if you enter the Log application, you will find yourself in a list of all calls, which have taken place in the last 30 days. This includes even data connections and the messages sent and received in that period. Log length can be reduced to save some memory space, but it is not that memory-consuming anyway, so it's very unlikely that you resort to that.Messaging
We have already mentioned that Nokia 5700 is aimed at the young, and texting is surely an age thing. Given its target, it's important that the phone scores well in the SMS department. We were glad to discover that it completely lived up to our expectations. For a non-QWERTY keypad that is, because it can hardly match the efficiency of its business orientated contemporaries - Nokia E70 and Nokia E61 for example. But among standard numeric-keypad devices 5700 scores great. We have already explained the benefits of the keypad, so we're not going to go in any more detail now. The SMS editor displays a counter of the characters left of the 160 limit. It also displays in brackets the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending, should the single message character limit be exceeded. The display allows 6 lines to be shown en bloc. If activated, delivery reports popup on the standby screen when the keypad is not locked. After that, they are stored in a separate folder in the Messaging sub-menu.
The MMS editor is very intuitive and easy to use. Nokia 5700 works with POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The email client can download headers only, as well as full messages. Attachments are also supported. This email client manages most user needs regarding email communication. There is also an audio message recorder in case you want to send someone a voice note.
Music player - no novelties
Considering its XpressMusic label, with Nokia 5700 we expected something totally different (read: better) from other Nokia devices. As it comes out this is not completely true. The player is quite usual indeed. It has not undergone any innovations or significant changes compared to other Symbian 3rd edition devices. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and WMA. The controls of the player are very intuitive. It also manages the M3U playlist format perfectly and can even handle the file automatically if it is placed in the same directory as the tracks. Users can use card readers for transferring music to the memory card but the phone's own USB port is just as fast and thus a much more convenient solution. Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts for scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds all of them to the music library.
The player comes with four different equalizer presets but it also allows altering them or creating a new one. These can come in handy because the phone sound quality has an obvious flaw - the severe lack of bass elements. That can be partially compensated for with the equalizer. On the other hand the phone is doing very well with the high tones. This is especially true when you listen to music through the earphones that come in the retail package. These are also very comfortable and with a long enough cable that allows to put the phone in a pocket even at you knee level. Same as with Nokia N76, the music player of Nokia 5700 cannot be switched off once it is started. Not that it slows down the phone noticeably, but still having a program that you don't use running in background and consuming precious RAM is not that good.
The phone also supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile allowing listening to your favorite tracks on stereo Bluetooth headphones. This is easier said than done though, as we faced a lot of difficulties trying to pair our Nokia 5700 with a Motorola headset we had around. We never succeeded to get them to work properly, but this is probably an isolated case. Still, if you have a stereo Bluetooth headset on your mind - you'd be better off if you test its compatibility with the Nokia 5700 before handing the cash.
The last components of the music installation of the device are the loudspeakers. Positioned in a way that makes them stand on one side when the dedicated multimedia keypad is active they produce great stereo sound of good quality, though not as impressive in terms of volume. The Samsung D900 loudspeakers produce much louder noise for example, although the latter isn't dubbed a music phone. Having said that we really loved the sound coming from the loudspeakers - rich and deep enough it manages it impress when compared to any other handset we've reviewed.
Nokia 5700 comes equipped with Real player and Flash player. The video can be played in fullscreen also. We already mentioned that if you rotate to 90 degrees, the phone will lie on its side but we couldn't help ourselves pointing it out again, as this is an interesting design solution indeed. In this position it would be really comfortable to watch a video while the Nokia 5700 lies on your desk.
Gallery - old but gold
Nokia 5700 doesn't have the 3D rotating gallery of the N-series smartphones. Images and videos are presented in list view only. Other than that, there are no differences in terms of functionality. You can view the pictures and videos both in portrait and landscape mode, as well as in full screen with no visible borders at all.
Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it up to 800% and view it in great detail. The actual zooming is also very fast, in line with the overall performance of the smartphone. So is every aspect of the media-related performance of Nokia 5700.
Otherwise the gallery has a nice file-management functionality, meaning that you can select and send multiple files. Besides, the smartphone has the usual file manager that does a pretty decent job when it comes to filtering files according to the memory used, and marking, moving, copying and managing files. As for application management, there is also a separate Application manager. The latter is very familiar as it doesn't differ from other Symbian devices.
Regretfully, Nokia 5700 doesn't feature one especially useful application - "Search". This means you have to spend extra time in organizing your applications, unless you want to end up with a mess that will take ages to deal with. Anyways, you can always download it additionally from the Nokia's website.
Let's take some pictures
We made it clear that Nokia 5700 is a phone aimed at the young. So having a camera is an essential thing. The handset is armed with a 2 megapixel camera with a maximum available resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. The camera settings are not as limited as in its business brother E61i, for example, but still this is not the most highly customizable camera in the world. The available settings include: panorama, night mode, sequence, self-release, white balance, and color effects. The panorama is an interesting feature similar to that found on Sony Ericsson devices. It allows you to combine several shots in a single picture. The only flaw is the low vertical resolution it uses. We couldn't produce a picture more than 230 pixels high no matter how hard we tried. You can also adjust white balance and color tone manually. Flash settings are also present although the built-in LED flash is quite inadequate even indoors. Pictures are stored in JPEG format and carry EXIF information. As far as quality is concerned, we find the 2 megapixel camera a jot below-average, but still passable. The picture quality is pretty much the same as the one of the Nokia E70 - they seem to have identical hardware and processing. Somewhat confusingly, the shutter sound goes off a second or something before the actual capturing of the picture so you really have to keep the handset still even after you've heard the sound in order to take a picture of your intended subject. The camera button is quite comfortable to press when the swivel is twisted to 90 degrees but the joystick is not, as it is located too close to the rotating part and therefore can make adjusting the camera settings quite a hard job.
As far as video is concerned, the maximum video resolution is 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA) and video is recorded at 12 fps in the MPEG-4 video format. The digital zoom during recording is smooth - unlike that of Nokia N80, N93 or N95. The movie editor (Muvee) program is also available allowing you to create your own movies.
Hello world
In terms of connectivity Nokia 5700 is in the golden mean: not the most loaded of all devices, but still won't let you down in most cases. Besides the already mentioned Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, the phone supports USB connectivity, which works seamlessly, and an Infrared port, which seemingly is making an unexpected comeback in most new Nokia models. The network capabilities for data transfer include HSCSD, GPRS and EDGE as well as UMTS of course. Latest support for SIP-based VoIP services is also available.
WWWonderful
Web browsing with Nokia 5700i is a sheer pleasure as is the case with all current Nokia smartphones. The web browser makes even very sophisticated pages fit on the screen and displays web pages just as on PC. There is no doubt that the great display helps a lot here.
There is even a mouse cursor which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. Surprisingly, it works great and is very easy to control, except for the uncomfortable joystick. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page shows up on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map can also be accessed by a shortcut - the "8" key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the "*" and "#" buttons. Of course, on 5700 all those shortcuts are available by using the selection key.
Most of the sites we logged on to (including gsmarena.com, check out the screenshots) looked exactly like on PC. Even when loading complex pages, the web browser was fast, no slowdowns in the scrolling speed. The browser also handles Flash objects and has no problems dealing with Java Scripts. All-in-all, it's an impressive job from Nokia. Generally, this browser remains the best mobile browser we've seen so far.
The Symbian web browser is unable to open simple WAP pages so for that purpose the Nokia 5700 is equipped with the much simpler WAP browser called Services.
Plan and go
The phone has various organizer applications and features. The Calendar has Month, Week and Day views. You can schedule a Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do in the Calendar. All those can be set alarms.
Applications aren't the 5700's element. The Quickoffice is missing here and so are the PDF reader and the ZIP manager. Converter, calculator and voice recorder are available, as well as the Notes application. They have the same well-known functionality as in other Symbian devices.
Finally, the phone has an excellent Tutorial tool which describes the main functions of the phone in a very user-friendly way.
Game on
Nokia 5700 comes with the same two preinstalled games the Nokia 6120 classic has. Both are very entertaining. Moreover, Nokia has set up the www.nokiazine.net website, where you can find a lot of free new games for Nokia 5700. Although not very popular at this stage, Nokiazine is expected to play a key part in some Nokia campaigns in the future.
The verdict
Having squeezed every last drop out of our Nokia 5700 let us end our review by putting everything in context and saying a few words about our general impression. We believe we've answered the question at the beginning of the review. The Nokia 5700 performance as a smartphone is by far superior to its music capabilities. The latter are only slightly above average. So if you are looking for a phone to use for strictly music purposes, you'd better look elsewhere. Are you after a balanced overall performance? Look no further. Nokia 5700 is exactly the phone for you and its unmatched speed will never make you regret your purchase. We really don't believe that the target audience should be confined to music fans. This highly capable handset is a true value for money.
Popular Searches:Mobile Prices
- Mobile rates India- rates in Mumbai- rates in Indian Rupees, Karachi Pakistan, - cellphones in Delhi- Phones Video Reviews - Nokia rates Samsung - Mobiles in Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Pune Cellfone India, Used Mobiles, Nokia Samsung Virgin China Reliance Micromax Trends Apple I Nexus One Ahmedabad Allahabad Amritsar Aurangabad Bangalore Bhopal Bhubaneswar Calcutta Calicut Chandigarh Chennai Latest Clubs
