Nokia 5530 review

The Nokia 5800 ‘Tube’ marked a turning point for Nokia’s music strategy, which ultimately evolved into the new Xseries range - and the all singing, all dancing X6 coming soon.

But, there’s still life in the XpressMusic range yet - and while the X6 takes things a step up, the 5530 brings the touchscreen music device down to the masses, sitting underneath the 5800 in the product ladder.

Sadly, someone took the words ‘cut cost’ a little too literally at the design stage, coming up with something that looks rather cheap.

If this is aimed at a younger market that are cost conscious, but still need to be seen with something trendy, then Nokia may have scored a bit of an own-goal, with cheap plastic standing out from the poor attempt to give it a premium look with a silver surround.

The sliding keylock button looks like it fall off just by sneezing on it - although fortunately looks can be deceiving and despite low cost materials, it does actually feel quite solid.

The phone is also equipped with a stylus, like the original 5800. It’s probably more necessary here too, as the screen is smaller, which is a shame because it’s something to break, lose or stop you using the phone easily with one hand.

The resistive screen works surprisingly well though, meaning you can use your fingers for most of the applications - it’s the option screens that can cause a bit more trouble as you try and navigate them.

For the everyday task of dialling numbers on the full-screen keypad, or entering numbers and text via the (landscape) Qwerty keyboard, we had no problems at all.

You could almost be excused for thinking it has a capacitive touchsceen, but it certainly is not - and if you don’t ensure the screen is locked when you put the phone in your pocket, you may find yourself doing all sorts of things you don’t want.

Whereas the 5800 came with integrated GPS, 3G and an 8GB memory card, Nokia has removed both GPS and 3G and shipped the 5530 with a 4GB memory card. Of course, you can invest in an larger card at any time, and the 5530 supports cards up to 32GB.

Nokia has also kept the almost hidden XpressMusic key that sits just above the top righthand side of the screen - giving you easy access to key tasks, including the music player and your messages.

If you decide to get this with the Comes With Music service, giving a year of completely unlimited and unrestricted music downloads, this is a much cheaper offering than the 5800 - and ideal if you’re not really that bothered about getting on the Internet at full speed or using any type of navigation software.

You can of course install Google Maps and use cell-based location for an approximation of your location, which is still fine for finding out where you are.

Without 3G, the only way of getting a fast data connection is with Wi-Fi - a possibly unexpected feature of a relatively low-end model. This means you can set up sharing on a PC and access music, pictures and video from the phone. You can also send content from the phone the other way.

A simple wizard guides you through the setup process, although we found it a little on the slow side. This feature has been on many Series 60 devices for some time and has never really proved to be much more than a gimmick. Our advice is to buy a larger memory card and store the content on the phone in the first place.

On the imaging side, the phone comes with the 5800’s 3.2-megapixel camera and flash - and it can also record video at VGA (640x480 pixels). Okay, so it doesn’t have a keyboard or the 5-megapixel camera from the N97, but there’s not much else that is different in terms of the capabilities of the operating system.

There’s the latest Nokia email client and support for the official Facebook application, although compared to the BlackBerry or iPhone versions, Nokia’s one is only a small step up from using the mobile website.

Twitter fans are hereby ordered to install Gravity, which is in the process of being enhanced to work with Facebook too. It’s not a free application, but you can try it for 10 days, which should be ample time to discover how good it is.

The relatively small screen does make the web browser tricky to use and navigate, and there’s no iPhone-like kinetic scrolling. There’s a chance Nokia may add the updated web browse in the future, some time after it rolls out to N97 users, but at the time of writing this review it was still to be confirmed. As a low-end model, Nokia may reserve some of the newest tweaks for the flagship models.

The 5530 is primarily about playing music, video, podcasts or listening to the radio, and the music player comes with a range of styles that are adjusted by changing the theme. You can play music from the internal speakers (you’ll struggle to see where they are at the top and bottom of the phone) or connect headphones via the 3.5mm jack. You can also stream music with Bluetooth to wireless headphones or speakers.

Video playback is decent too, and the phone comes with PC software to re-encode existing content. You can either drag and drop music directly to the music folder, or use the Nokia Music Store to manage your music.

If you buy this with Comes With Music, all of your downloads are free - and ‘side-loaded’ from your PC. At the end of your subscription, assuming you don’t renew, all of your music can be kept forever.

Despite the cheap looks, Nokia has produced a phone that is perfectly adequate for listening to music, making calls, sending texts and taking pictures. The operating system will let you do much more, but then the small screen and lack of 3G begins is likely to lead to disappointment.