Nokia 5320 XpressMusic
Powered by the new Symbian S60 OS 9.3 with FP2. Nokia 5320 Xpress Music is small, sleek and very light. It has excellent sound quality and above all, it is not very expensive. In fact, it is one of the cheapest S60 smartphones. It is fully packed with most standard connectivity options as well, which makes us wonder whether it should be marketed as a music phone or a smart phone.
It is one of the few phones that possess almost everything a phone should and at a very reasonable price. It does lack out at some points like the absence of Wi-Fi and GPS. We attempt to review this device and try to showcase its weak and strong points. Finally, we check out whether this phone emerges out a winner or turns out to be just another damp squib.
Design and Display:
The Nokia 5320 Xpress Music is a very compact phone and has dimensions of 108 x 46 x 15 mm which are very small compared to other smartphones with similar features. It weighs just 90 gms which is light compared to smartphone standards. It has a normal candy bar form factor and features a cute new design with rounded edges. It is fully made of plastic and has quite a good build quality. It is sturdy enough, conforming to Nokia’s famous durability standards meaning that it can easily withstand some light drops. The design was meant to appeal to the younger generation and it seems to do quite a good job at that. The alphanumeric keypad is standard and ergonomic with large keys that are easy to press. It has good backlighting making it easy to operate in the dark. The D Pad is comfortable and gels in with the keypad.
Coming to the design details, the front face of the 5320 consists of the 2.0″ screen and the keypad. On the top of the front face are the earpiece, the videocall camera and a “My Own” key which can be used to set personalized shortcuts to any application or function. The right side sports the camera key and the volume rocker while the left face houses three dedicated music control keys. On the top is just the Power key in the middle. The bottom sports the Micro USB slot, the 3.5 mm headphone jack and the charger slot. The back of the phone houses the 2 MP camera with dual LED flash.
The display is a 2.0″ TFT supporting 16 M colors and resolutions of the standard 240 x 320 px. The screen size is a bit of a letdown as it isn't very easy to read it at such resolutions. The display quality is good with decent brightness and contrast levels and vibrant colors. It has good sunlight legibility as well.
OS and Interface features :
The Nokia 5320 Xpress Music is powered by Symbian OS v9.3 rel 3.2 with Feature Pack 2. It is the latest edition of the very popular Symbian OS. It is one of the few phones to sport the new features including the N78 and the E71. Feature Pack 2 adds in a host of new functionality and visual and performance improvements. As the 5320 has a powerful 369 MHZ ARM 11 processor and a good amount of RAM - about 80 MB at bootup, the OS feels very fast and responsive. There are no lags or delays when multitasking about apps.
The 5320 never slows down even with quite a few apps active. FP2 comes with a lot of cool new animations added to the User Interface. The 5320 supports the vast library of Symbian Apps - Office Applications, Email clients, Chat clients, Imaging Apps, Audio and Video players, File Explorers and much more. It has the standard Symbian Contacts and Messaging apps with slight improvements. It does have a few quirks but those can easily be fixed with firmware updates.
Web browsing is a pleasure, as on all other Nokia OS 9 phones. The built in OSS browser based on Webkit is excellent and renders even heavy and detailed web pages exactly as they would on a PC. You seldom feel any lag, thanks to the huge amount of RAM in the 5320. The only thing you can complain about is the small screen.
It is rumored that the 5320 will support Ngage 2.0 games with a future firmware update as soon as all bugs related to the Ngage 2.0 application on FP2 are ironed out.
Multimedia playback :
The Nokia 5320 Xpress Music doesn’t quite live up to expectations of being the latest Xpress Music phone.The sound quality is definitely better than most phones but nothing spectacular. The loudspeaker quality is great and is very loud too. It supports many audio formats like MP3, AAC, eAAC+, WMA natively. The new Music Player is simple and easy to use. It has 5 default equalizer preset settings you can choose from. You can also create more if you wish to. The 5320 XM also supports A2DP which enables you to hear streaming music wirelessly on your stereo Bluetooth headset. The three dedicated music keys on the side are a great addition allowing you to control your music with a click. You can also plug in your own headphones directly to the 3.5 mm jack without the need of any adapters.
The video playback is great on the superb 16 M color screen. You can view videos in fullscreen mode in the default Real player. You can also install many other video players like Smartmovie player, DivX player or Core Player. However, a bigger screen would definitely have added to the video watching experience. the 2″ screen is not very suitable for watching videos. Other than that, there are absolutely no negatives when it comes to video playback. There are no delays in opening and viewing media files, all thanks to FP 2.
Camera and FM :
The Nokia 5320 XM has a sub standard 2.0 MP (1600 x 1200 px) camera with a dual LED Flash. The camera interface is good but it doesn’t feature many customizable options. It doesn’t have autofocus. It comes as a shocker as almost all new phones these days sport atleast a 3.2 MP camera. It takes average pics that have slightly washed out colors. It shoots video at 15 FPS at QVGA (320 x 240) resolution. The video quality isn’t much to speak of either. Overall, if you want a decent camera phone, this isn’t where you should be looking at.
It also features a FM Radio with RDS and comes a nice, easy to use interface which can auto scan all the available stations and store them. It comes with RDS support and the Visual Radio app.
Connectivity :
The 5320 carries a host of connectivity options like GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 which is a bit surprising considering that is is essentially a Xpress Music phone. However it does miss out on Wi-Fi which shouldn’t be much of a problem as it wasn’t intended to be an office phone anyways. It doesn’t have IR support also but that standard is almost dead now. It also doesnt support GPS which means that you will have to use an external GPS receiver. But that is understandable considering the other features it packs, and its price.
Accessories :
Along with the Nokia 5320 XM, you get a 1 GB MicroSD card, the Xpress Music handsfree, a charger and a Micro USB data cable. You also get the regular manuals and a PC Suite CD. It has a weak 890 mAh BL-5B battery powering it which provides about 3.5 hrs of talktime and lasts for more than a day with standard usage.
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