Nokia 5530 - A Low Cost Touch Screen Music Phone

By Author: Jerry Smith
Total Articles: 224
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Nokia 5530 is a great XpressMusic series phone because it includes as many features as possible but with a rather friendly price. This 2G mobile phone was basically designed to bring the touch screen to everyone then people can enjoy the UI of the Symbian S60 operating system. The Nokia 5530 is a slim version measuring 104 x 49 x 13 mm and weighing 107 g. The Li-Ion 1000 mAh battery provides superior talk time of 4 hours 54 minutes, music play for 27 hours and standby time of 336 hours.

The front panel of the Nokia 5530 is dominated by touch screen. The call keys and menu hardware keys are touch operated. A proximity sensor is found at the front side. The Nokia 5530 features a 2.9" resistive touch screen which has a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels and it can display 16 million colors. The sensitivity is very much improved than its predecessors and you won't find the need to use the stylus as you use the phone. The major problem with the screen is that it has very poor legibility under sunlight. The accelerometer rotates the view of the phone when you change the phone mode from portrait to landscape and vice versa.

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... Symbian S60 user interface is great to use. The finger scrolling option in the interface has been improved, making the phone more finger-friendly. However, it takes time to get used to the list scrolling. Also, the opening items in the list are different from the opening icons. You need to get used to the interface in order to use the Nokia 5530 in an efficient way. The home screen is very much customizable and you can access all your favorite applications from the main screen itself.

The phonebook of the Nokia 5530 brings in no new options. The search feature is made much simpler. Telephony applied in this phoneis as perfect as any other Nokia mobile phones, but there is no smart dialing feature. However, the voice dialing option compensates for the absence of smart dialing. You can silence the mobile phone by flipping it because of the accelerometer. All types of messaging such as SMS, MMS and emails can be sent using a common editor. To type texts, you can use the alphanumeric keypad in portrait mode or tilt the phone to landscape mode to bring up the full QWERTY keyboard. Handwriting recognition is another interesting feature that requires using tylus.

The camera in the Nokia 5530 is 3.15 MP with 2048 x 1536 pixels. However, the picture quality is not quite good. Photos can be Geo tagged and a number of image editing options are available. The video is not ideal, but there are few settings which you can use for your captured videos.

As the Nokia 5530 is a XpressMusic mobile phone, the music player on this phone is as great as expected. There are quite a few cosmetic changes made to the music player and it is completely touch optimized. The media player supported a huge number of file formats and the equalizer is available to change the way you want to listen to your favorite music. The FM player with RDS support makes it possible to listen to music when you are on the go. Watching videos in the Nokia 5530 is pretty satisfactory; however, the small screen limits the enjoyment. Furthermore, DivX and XviD formats are not supported by the player.

Wi-Fi connectivity is a welcome addition to the Nokia 5530 aside from Bluetooth and USB connection options. Web browser is also good to use with a few modern features including flash support. However, the Nokia 5530 doesn't have a GPS receiver.
Jerry Smith, the editor of http://www.mobilephoneonly.co.uk. An expert on mobile phone and an observer of UK telecommunication market. He writes reviews on latest mobile phones, and also suggests promotional deals and special offers from mobile phone retailers in UK.