Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The Iphone killer is here

Nokia 5800xpressmusic
http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/5800_XpressMusic?cp=1008A&entry=Newdevices-nokia5800

Is this the real iPhone killer? I guess so atleast in India. its not a geek phone but has all the power and features including the ubiquitous touchscreen interface, the first from nokia on S60(V5)( barring the previous attempts on the S90 platform). Infact I would go ahead and say this phone is better than even the legendary N95. N96 still have a couple features and more storage but nevertheless for the price of about 20k in India, this phone is a sure killer.

Just look at the feature set in the link above....just feels bad its not in the Nseries though it has the same features or even more. May be Nokia wanted to place it in the league of lifestyle,music phones than the geek gadget series i.e., Nseries.

With the huge High definition (16:9 ratio) 3.2" touch screen (compared to iPhone's 3.5") and dynamic touch interface, accelerometer(automatic orientation, movement based control...), tactile feedback etc, 640x320 resolution (compared to 480x320 in iphone) it's close/betterthan to the iPhone experience though multitouch is missing.

with 81MB internal storage(for phonebook and base storage), 8GB default storage with an addon microSD slot you can swap memory and also grow it to 16GB now to 32GB soon. this is surely where the 5800 beats the iphone which has fixed storage with no addon memory.

What more, it has the same quality camera with carl zeiss lens, LED flash and video recording at near dvd quality(,geo tagging with gps?), which was the cornerstone of the N95 series. at 3.2MP its good enough for most digital camera needs. I used to reduce the resolution to 3.5MP even in my 5MP N95. A xenon flash would have been better and may be a CCD sensor instead of cmos for true digital camera experience but yea I am asking for too much compared to the iPhones barebones 2mp camera without even autofocus or video recording. It also has a front camera for 3G video phone calls. A camera lens cover a'la n95 would have been good.

other features include the A-GPS with voice navigation(I heard its free), which is better than N95, a best in class music player with 1 year free subscription to nokia's music store, which makes it truely compete with the iphone's iPod feature.

yea the DVB-H feature of n96 is missing but who provides such a service in india? its at the best a techno preview.

sure it has a FM player as other nokia phones and a basic feature thesedays which ofcourse is lacking in iPhone.

new features of S60v5 include a better UI, easy access menus without the clutter of older S60, dedicated quick access buttons for keyfeatures like music player, bluetooth etc...
Surely nokia is listening to its users and also learning from competetion.


want more, here are the standard S60 features now,
push email for exchange,
a safari based good browser with flash video support,
quad band world phone,
3.5G wcdma hsdpa,
MMS(iPhone lacks this basic feature),
bluetooth with a2dp/AVRCP stereo headphone support,
voice recognition, tts engine etc
Push to talk,
j2me java support,
widsets,
USB2storage,
TV out,
standard headphone socket,
remote control mic,
wifi 802.11b/g
Ngage platform with motion sensor controls for great gaming experience.
built in office application viewers,
Flight/PDA mode.
integrated VOIP/VPN client - to be checked...

last but not least it is a nokia S60V5 phone which can run all the millions of 3rd party S60 applications and all the other advantages and features of S60 as I had blogged earlier

but for the downside, it as most nokia phones doesnot have the muscle power to handle the load. with a 370 Mhz arm 11 processor it will sure be much slower and less responsive, especially when loaded, compare to the powerful 650Mhz arm11 of iPhone for relatively less apps and load.
The RAM seems to be ok at 128MBwhich is good enough for multitasking and load 10 or more apps. This was a major issue in the N95classic with just 64MB RAM but was corrected in the 8GB and US versions of the phone.
Also I will need to check the battery life but with its BL-5J 1320 mAh battery I guess it should be decent.


looks like things are getting closer to my dream handheld