Nokia 5310 XpressMusic Phone

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Nokia is really, really trying its best to catch up to Sony Ericsson’s dominance in the walkman phone category. Their Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is Nokia’s bet against Sony Ericsson’s W880i Walkman phone. We’re not saying that the XpressMusic has indeed caught up but it has some really cool features that music afficionados will love.

The 5310 is an extremely slim phone, measuring at just about 10mm and has handy music playback buttons on the front.To start, let’s take a look at these cool features mentioned that you may consider as the phones’ strength.The 5310 is very very close to Nokia’s 5300 phone. While the 5300 is rather bulky, the 5310 is has a slim profile. Even with its slim profile, the 5310 contains the 5300’s row of music buttons found on the left of the screen.

The screen/display of the 5310 is large and occupies the front of the phone. You can easily notice its brightnss and its crisp resolution of 320X240 pixels. This makes all your messages, icons and pictures, stand out.

As a counterpart to Sony Ericsson’s Walkman Phones, this phone’s key feature is its music player. Contols are very easy to use and requires a short time to master. Your tracks are sorted into the usual artist, album and track name categories so you can quickly find the songs you want to play. The phone only comes in with a 30MB internal memory, but this is easily remedied by the 2GB microSD card that comes along with the phone so that you can store most of your music files.

As for its quality, you can describe it as impressive. Replacing the complimentary headphone is a must though as they’re not as good as you want them to be. However, replacing the headphones is made easy by the standard 3.5mm headphone jack found at the top of the phone. And, if you don’t want the standard jack, you can always get your favorite bluetooth headphones. The handset supports Bluetooth with the A2DP profile which allows you to stream music to a wireless headset, so there’s no problem there.

Now we go to the phone’s weaknesses. Let’s go straight to where it hurts the most. The 5310 is supposed to be a phone to compete with the W8810i, however, it falls short to the class and build of the W8810i. The W8810i sports a sturdy metallic casing while the 5310 is done with a plastic finish case that seems fragile - like a child’s toy.

Another thing to mention is that the phone lacks 3G support. As a music phone, you will have a hard time downloading songs over GPRS or HSCSD connections.

Overall, the phone doesn’t stand out from other music phones out there in the market. As a product that will compete with the SE W8810i, the 5310 fell short of that. The handset may be slim, but the case feels quite plasticky and the range of features on offer is nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s a decent phone, but not really an exceptional one.

Sources:
http://www.trustedreviews.com
http://www.conita.com
http://www.gsmmag.com