Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

Overall Rating

NOT RECOMMENDED! Before buying a Nokia 5800 Tube Xpress Music phone please read my review to see what a horrendous experience I have had with mine... all 4 ofthem!

Being a Nokia fan I was excited by the prospective launch of Nokia's verion of the iPhone and therefore delayed my upgrade until the 5800 was available.

I was looking forward to using touch screen technology, wi-fi capability, a quality camera and the bonus of a decent mp3 player. Within 24 hours of receiving the phone I was already experiencing problems but put them down to my own lack of knowledge on using many of the features that I was unfamiliar with. However I soon became aware that my phone was faulty with the biggest problem being that the phone would randomly reboot itself or even power down.

Other problems I noted with the 5800 were as follows:
1) The phone would occasionally put itself into silent mode.
2) The phone would lose communication with my Nokia bluetooth headset and then reconnect again within about 10 seconds... and then continue to do this with the only remedy being to reboot the handset.
3) Receiving a call when the bluetooth headset is meant to be a simple task of pressing the button on the headset to accept the call, except randomly the handset would reject the call instead, rectified by rebooting the handset.
4) The touch screen at times was completely non-responsive and would not navigate through screen pages.
5) The handset would freeze particularly after making an outgoing call and receiving engaged tone, only rectified by rebooting the phone.

I called T-Mobile and they replaced the handset immediately but the replacement phone also suffered from the problem of switching itself off!

Another complaint to T-Mobile and they gladly agreed to send a 3rd handset to me but it probably wasn't more that a few hours before this handset also turned itself off.

Yet another call to T-Mobile to tell them that I wasn't happy with the persistent faults with the build of this phone and I asked to be able to swap it for a completely different brand or at least take the issue up with Nokia, I was told to log 5 instances of these problems and call them back for a decision to be made regarding choosing a different model as they could certainly not contact Nokia and raise these issues. The incredible thing here is that T-Mobile reckoned that there were no known issues with the 5800 switching itself off but if you google "Nokia 5800 keeps switching itself off" you will find dozens of forums where thousands of users are complaining of the same issue, even Nokia's own official forum pages have scores of complaints about this problem!

Anyway, after about a week of persisting with a faulty phone and calling T-Mobile every time a fault occured I was told that they would only replace the handset for the same one and was forced to have a 4th 5800 handset! I am not joking when I say that within an hour of using the replacement it switched itself off!!! After speaking with a manager at T-Mobile I was eventually allowed to choose another brand but so far they do not have another wifi touch screen phone on their network apart from the Google phone which I do not like due to the qwerty layout.

So, for the last month I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for a suitable alternative to become available whilst almost every day finding my Nokia 5800 having switched itself off.

A few days ago my phone rang with the Nokia tune, I hate the Nokia tune and that's the first thing I change whenever I get a new Nokia so nhow did this happen?!

Here is a summary of other issues:
1) The wi-fi connection is painfully slow and in a race with my brother in law and him using his old iPhone to connect to the BBC home page via the same network my phone was second by a significant margin, it's like 56k dial up!
2) Connecting to wifi is a lottery and most of the time will take 2 or 3 attempts but to be honest I don't even bother anymore because navigating through pages is so laborious.
3) Downloading emails sometimes takes 2 or 3 attempts for the same reason above.
4) Using the phone on a public hot spot has never been possible, every time I have tried I get as far as connecting to the network but as soon as I try to browse or check emails the connection drops and all networks disappear from the network scan list, rebooting the handset makes the networks visible again but they disappear again after attempting a reconnection.
5) The handset boasts a Carl Zeiss lens and the 3mp photos are good when taken in good lighting conditions ie daylight, but low light conditions, even daylight indoors, produce awful photos which are dark and grainy and reminiscent of the early 0.75mp cameras. Even using the built in flash makes very little difference to the outcome to the point that I would say don't even bother wasting your time using the camera indoors.
6) When the battery is running low you get virually no warning before expiry. Other Nokia phones I have owned will warn you for about 15 minutes during a call that the battery is low but this one gives you one audible warning about a munite before expiring.

The only good thing I have to say about this handset is that the music player is good. Good quality audio even using the built in speaker which reproduces decent low range tones not tinny distortion.

On the whole this phone is clearly THE WORST NOKIA EVER PRODUCED in my experience and despite my dislike of anything Apple I am now on a mission to try and annul my contract with T-Mobile and get an iPhone.

DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE!