Nokia 5700 XpressMusic mobile phone
It’s been about three years since I bought a new cell phone, the way things change it might just as well have been 30.
It’s been about three years since I bought a new cell phone, the way things change it might just as well have been 30.
Nokia 5700 XpressMusic is a huge step up from what I’m using both in features and styling.
It’s a head turner and conversation starter.
Nokia is creating phones for niche markets and as such the 5700 is a 3G phone designed for the music lover.
It has a unique rotating body so you can spin the key-pad 270 degrees, enabling you to use the phone, 2 MP camera, video and music player functions.
Using the camera is a bit awkward though. You have to hold the phone on its side with screen facing you and twist the keypad so the camera lens faces away from you.
Flip it towards you for video calling or a self-portrait if you’d prefer.
Spin the key pad right round and you get your MP3 player buttons.
As cool as this twist is, it does mean that for video calling you have to hold the phone sideways, so the buttons aren’t that easy to reach.
Rather than burdening the phone with onboard memory Nokia has opted for a micro SD drive.
The phone comes with a 512MB card, which you’d think would be more that sufficient, but with pre-loaded demo videos and other things on the demo phone there was only room on the card for about one album’s worth of music uploading.
Sometimes combo devices like the 5700 do everything so-so, but nothing great.
With the 5700 Nokia have managed to combine a decent camera, video good enough for basic YouTube uploads, and good sound.
Surprisingly even the phone’s speaker can carry a tune.
It worked well as an iPod replacement on my cycle commute to the office, but if that was your intention I’d suggest buying a larger memory card for greater tune selection.