It's been a while since I've gotten the world's first Symbian S60 5th Edition touchscreen phone from Nokia, and through playing with it for the last couple of days, I am able to write a review based on my personal usage.The phone is reviewed with an export set (shouldn't have any difference from the local one except no local warranty & no Come With Music service) based on the latest firmware (V20) which I managed to upgrade thru some means (don't ask me how, google for it). And I will made comparisions with my old phone, N95 8GB as I do not know the FP2 devices before.
Since this is Nokia's mid-range phone (with top-range platform imo), I don't expect the phone to be made out of premium materials. As most had guessed, the entire external casing is made out of plastics. I gotten myself a red set but upon close inspection, the side casing is made out of translucent red plastics with a opaque red plastic strip around it. The back cover is also of plastics and followed the design of current N series back cover. While it's made entirely out of plastics, there's no sign of creaking and feels very solid and well built. As compared to my N95, there's a good improvement in this department.The phone do not have much hardware keys, only volume, camera, power, call and menu keys. The menu and call keys are situated below the screen, the volume and camera keys on the right side and power key on the top, alongside with the 3.5mm jack, charging socket and microUSB slot. Personally, I do not fancy the idea of using micro USB as I find mini USB cables are more common than the former. I myself have more than 5 such cables and now I can't use them on this phone. Well that's me though, some probably don't have this gripe as mine.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is not the first touchscreen device in Nokia's range. In 2004, the Nokia 7700 was announced, a Nokia Series 90 device that was cancelled before it reached the market. This was followed by the Nokia 7710 which was an upgraded version of the 7700 and became available during 2005. Nokia also produced the UIQ-based Nokia 6708 phone in 2005, but this was not an in-house development and was bought in from Taiwanese manufacturer BenQ.Nokia have also produced a range of Maemo-based Internet Tablets which have a touchscreen interface, but are not mobile phones by themselves (one can connect and use a phone via Bluetooth).
