Nokia 5320 XpressMusic mobile phone

Nokia has cranked up the volume of its mobile music message recently with the debut of its Comes With Music download service and the unveiling of its touchscreen 5800 XpressMusic handset. At the same time, Nokia has also been reinforcing its band of XpressMusic devices with the release of some tidy if relatively low-key music- …

[Andy Worth]

Not great....

The phone looks cheap and tacky at best, and the blue version just looks truly awful. 1GB of memory for a phone where the chief selling point is music is really poor, what considering the low-price nature of flash memory these days they could have doubled that without a significant change of cost. A giant like Nokia would perhaps pay a couple of quid extra for a 2GB card instead, whereas it will cost the end-user more than that.

I haven't played with the interface on this phone but then I can't really be unbiased about it as I don't generally get on with Nokia interfaces. If the music player is similar to their earlier phones then it will be uninspired and the part-working "say and play" facility is nothing more than a gimmick.

I had a similar gimmick on a Sony Ericsson phone I had, which you could shake to change tracks. You had to hold down a button to do this though (which kind of defeated the object!) and aside from the button being tiny and hard to press, it was hard to determine whether your shake would move forward or backward a track, or move to a random one.

"Say and play" will be something you use about ten times to show your mates, which subsequently will laugh at you when your phone plays "Barbie Girl" instead of "Basket Case".

With the phones on the market at present, this doesn't provide anything significantly new or different. Aside from a fairly reasonable price I don't see any reason to choose this phone over any other offering on the market.