Nokia 5800 Cell Phone Review - Software
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Marianne Schultz Published on May 08, 2009 Comment on this |
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| The S60 is a powerful operating system and its 5th Edition brings some additional capabilities to make it suitable for use on a touchscreen device, but it's still not totally finger-friendly. Web browsing is very good on the 5800 and we're pleased to see a few full-version games on board out of the box. | |
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OS (8.0)
The 5800 runs Symbian S60 5th Edition, earning a standard 8 points under our scoring guide. This is the latest iteration of the S60 operating system that adds touchscreen capabilities, the ability to recognize and use additional internal sensors, such as an accelerometer, and improved web browsing, and more. Despite these new capabilities, it's still very familiar to those who have used previous editions of the S60 operating system. Previous experience with S60 made the 5800 easy to use, though it might not be intuitive for the new user. As we've mentioned, the double-tap required to open items feels very counter-intuitive on a touchscreen device and the interface as a whole is not optimized for touchscreen use. S60 is a well-established and powerful OS, but it needs more work to make using a touchscreen device a fluid and pleasant experience.
The main menu
Home Screen Score (6.5)
The 5800's default home screen doesn't offer as much functionality or information as we'd like. In the Settings menu, it's identified as the Contacts Bar home screen theme, and it allows you to place quick links for up to 4 contacts on the home screen, and this theme prevents you from adding application shortcuts to the home screen at the same time. The Basic theme doesn't allow you to place shortcuts of any kind on the home screen. The Shortcuts Bar theme offers the most flexibility and information, allowing you to place 4 application shortcuts on the home screen, and it places a global search bar and upcoming calendar items on the home screen as well. As you can probably guess, this is our favorite home screen theme. though we wouldn't say it's as useful and informative as the Active Standby screen on the Nokia N96 running S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2.
The default home screen and the Shortcut Bar home screen theme we prefer
No matter what home screen theme you've selected, you'll always have the signal strength meter, the time and date, battery strength meter, notification icons, and connectivity status icons, and carrier information at the top of the home screen. Shortcuts to the virtual dial pad and the Contacts application are present at the bottom of the screen no matter what theme has been selected.
Extensibility (8.0)
The S60 operating system is generally very extensible, with thousands of 3rd-party applications available to enhance a device's functionality. However, the S60 5th Edition that the 5800 uses pares down the number of compatible applications a bit since it's fairly new and not all S60 applications will work optimally with a touch interface. A quick search on Handango.com yields 676 applications for the 5800, a far cry from the 25,000+ now available for the iPhone 3G in the App Store. However, the 5800 can also run Java applications, increasing its extensibility quite a bit and earning it a few more points here.
Customizability (7.0)
The customizability options for the S60 OS are plentiful and have always pleased us. In addition to changing the home screen's wallpaper, you can download and install themes that will change the look of the entire interface. A quick search on Zedge.net revealed over 400 themes for the 5800, all free.
Selecting a home screen theme, the main themes menu, and changing the main menu
When it comes to menus, you can choose to view them in a grid or list view and re-arrange them to your heart's content. While you can change the font size system-wide, you can't change the font itself unless you choose a theme that uses a different font.
OS Responsiveness (4.0)
We had a few issues with the 5800 where the screen was sometimes unresponsive even though the haptic feedback indicated a touch was registered. We also didn't like how it was unclear if the unlock switch needed to be used once the screen auto-dimmed. Sometimes the screen was dark and we used the unlock switch to activate it, but it turned out that the 5800 had not locked yet and so using the unlock switch simply locked the phone, which was the opposite of what we wanted. The way the iPhone 3G handles this is much cleaner - once the screen goes off, you must use the home or sleep/wake button to access it again, and there's no confusion about whether or not the phone is locked or not when the screen is off.
We found no way to turn the haptic feedback off, so you'll want to avoid the 5800 if you think this will annoy you over time.
Browser Features (12.0)
The 5800's browser has a robust feature set. It can handle WAP and HTML pages as well as JavaScript elements, frames, and feeds, but not Java and Flash. While you can't save images directly when viewing a web page, you can choose to view a web page's images separately through the Display Options command in the Options menu, and save them from there. The 5800's browser can also handle encryption, cookies, and automatically fill out forms, including passwords, for you.
Browsing Interface (10.0)
When you open the 5800's browser, the default view is the Bookmarks list, which is actually your default home page, with a link to see your recently viewed pages at the top. To enter a URL, you tap on a shortcut at the bottom, represented by a globe with an arrow on it, which really doesn't seem to indicate URL entry for us, but okay. Tapping on this shortcut brings up a virtual keyboard for URL entry. After you enter the URL, you have to close the keyboard, then press Go To at the bottom to actually prompt the browser to navigate to that page.
Viewing a page in landscape orientation
When you open a full HTML page, you are presented with just the top left corner of the page, not a view of the entire page as you see on the iPhone 3G. There's a plus button shortcut in the bottom right corner that offers zoom control so you can see more or less of the page as you like. Double-tapping on a portion of the page zooms in more quickly, though. You can navigate around a page by dragging your finger around the screen, though there is no multi-touch that allows using more than one finger for navigation and other controls.
Viewing a page in full screen mode
The menu button above the Options menu gets you quickly to shortcuts to bookmark the current page, find keywords, reload the page, and much more. There's also a full-screen toggle here so you can browse without any buttons or menus taking up space on the screen. If you change the 5800's orientation to landscape, the view will change appropriately. Bookmarks can be saved and edited, and you can create folders to organize them further.
The browser's menu
Your browsing history is shown only in the Recently Visited Pages folder in the Bookmarks list, and it saves a good deal of your browsing history from previous sessions. You can change the font size between 5 options. When you choose to go back to view a previous page, you're presented with a neat carousel view of pages that you can flick through to make it easy to go back multiple steps. If you're concerned about security, you can clear cookies, history, and password/form data manually, as well as the browser's cache.
The Privacy settings and Bookmarks menu
You can't have multiple pages open at once, though the carousel view when you navigate forward or background makes this a little easier to bear. Overall, the 5800's browser is reasonably pleasant to use and gives you a high-quality browsing experience for a phone.
Browser Access (6.67)
Unlike the time-based tests we do in other areas, here we count how many steps it takes to navigate to a web page to see how easy it is and to avoid network connection speed as a factor. We count every screen or button press, though we count the entry of the URL itself as a single step. On the 5800, it takes 6 steps to complete this test, more than any of our comparison phones because of the extra screen press needed to close the on-screen keyboard before you can command the browser to go to the designated page. Since we use the default settings to complete this test, you could cut this down a little by placing a shortcut to the browser on the home screen instead of needing to go through the main menu to get to it.
Gaming (7.0)
The 5800 comes with 3 full games: Guitar Rock Tour, Bounce, and Global Racing Thunder. Guitar Rock Tour is a Guitar Hero knock-off featuring slightly annoying polyphonic music. Bounce is a cute game about a red ball rolling and bouncing through an imaginary land where an evil square has hypnotized the inhabitants to do his bidding. Global Racing Thunder is a racing game (surprise!) that uses the internal accelerometer to control the car.
A scene from the intro to the Bounce game
We're really happy to see some full-version games on the 5800 and they will definitely help you kill the time while you're waiting in line somewhere. We found the screen to be reasonably responsive to input and didn't really hinder game-play, though the accelerometer was very sensitive and takes a little time to get used to.
If you want more games, the included Download application should offer you the ability to download more, according to the 5800's user guide, but no games were available when we checked. In the browser, there is a games download site bookmarked, though when we visited this site, we were only shown options to download graphics or tones. For whatever reason, the 5800 doesn't appear to be able to download N-Gage games, but you can still use Java games if you're hankering for something more than what's already included.
Calculator (4.0)
The 5800's calculator application is plain but it is functional enough to handle memory functions and square root calculations. If you need a full scientific or financial calculator on board, you'll need to look elsewhere.
The calculator
Alarm (8.0)
The 5800's Clock application allows you to set multiple alarms and you can name each one and choose somewhat flexible recurrence options. You can't choose the alarm tone and vibrate mode for each individual alarm, however, so you should pick on you like unless you want to change them often. Recurrence options are daily, workdays, and weekly, but there's no way to set a more complex pattern, such as every other Friday. The settings menu allows you to set the default alarm snooze time and customize your workdays, which is nice. You should have no trouble using the 5800 as your sole alarm clock to keep you on track.
The alarms list and creating a new alarm
Document Software (0.0)
The 5800 does not come with any software to view or edit Microsoft Office or PDF documents, though this is not surprising since it's not a business-oriented device, as the Blackberry Storm and HTC Touch Diamond are.
Other Software (0.0)
There are no other applications included on the 5800 that add significant functionality that earn it points in this section.
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