Nokia 5300 XpressMusic review

There are many handsets around designed to offer special features to fans of mobile music. Nokia’s 5300 XpressMusic is, as its name implies, one of them.

This is a slider phone which means it is pretty small and tidy in the pocket and the hand. It measures just 92mm tall, 48mm wide and 21mm thick. It is taller when you slide the top and bottom sections apart to reveal the number pad – then it grows to around 130mm. But most of the time you don’t need to use the slider, because of the bank of buttons on the front of the casing.

From a music point of view the most important of these are found along the left side of the screen. They are three music controls, for pause/play action, skip forward and skip backwards. The play/pause button will start the music player running too. If you are a radio fan, you can set these buttons up to control the radio instead.

The rest of the front buttons are pretty straightforward – two selection keys, Call and End keys and a navigation button with a central selection key. A pair of buttons on the right side control volume, while a final side button beneath these starts the camera running.

The camera shoots stills at up to 1.3 megapixels. This isn’t all that great these days, but the camera is very, very easy to use. Hit the side button and it starts running, and the phone’s screen goes into wide mode and you pop the camera onto its side in your hand. Now the camera side button sits under your right forefinger, with the selection keys under your right thumb so you can make settings and shoot your snaps or video.

The phone has only 5MB of built in memory, but it comes with a microSD memory card and cards are available in capacities up to 2GB.

There are plenty of advanced applications built in including calendar, Web browser and games. And you get software and a cable to connect the phone to your PC for data sharing and synchronising. There is even an adaptor provided so you can use your favourite 3.5mm headphones with this phone.