Nokia X5

Leave it to Nokia to veer away from the beaten track and come up with an entirely novel idea. We have become quite used to square phones that have swivel form-factor,

 but Nokia has combined the square with a slider in its latest foray into the handset space. We are talking about the Nokia X5, which comes incorporated with a slide out QWERTY keypad. The front panel has a 2.63 inch screen, but seeing empty space above the existing screen, we think it could have been made bigger.

The microSD card slot is under the battery, so you cannot hotswap it. Sliding up the front panel reveals a full QWERTY keypad; while you might find using the top row a bit uncomfortable, the keypad is pretty tactile to use. The keys are big, well placed and convenient. All in all, the phone is pretty unique in its looks. The one that we got for review was grey in colour, but there are more bright and cheerful colour options available.

Smart Symbian

The operating system for the Nokia X5 is Symbian 9.3 and it comes with S60 third edition UI with FP2. As expected you can find various standby themes such as active standby, basic, vertical icon bar, contacts bar, etc. Each of these themes enables you to customise the homescreen in a particular manner. You can easily add the features that you wish to directly access from the homescreen. Another interesting feature is the accelerometer based control. If you press the volume key and shake the phone it gives a ring according to the number of new messages you get, you can shake it to change tracks . You can also turn the phone upside down to silence calls or snooze alarms. On the messaging front, apart from SMS and MMS, the phone comes with pre-loaded settings for Ovi Mail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail along with Mail For Exchange. The Email functionality is good, as it has attachment support. Quick Office document viewer lets you open office files, but you will have to buy an upgrade if you wish to create documents.

On the social networking front, the phone has preloaded Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Twitter and hi5 and all you need to do is simply log in to start networking. While Facebook is a pre-loaded app, MySpace, Twitter and Hi5 are just Internet links. For your IM needs, the phone offers Ovi Chat, which combines, Windows Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Gtalk, in the system of Nokia’s Ovi contacts to offer users a single client instant messaging experience. The Ovi Sync feature can sync all your personal data on the phone and save it on Ovi.com. You can sync your contacts, calendar and notes and also decide the sync interval to keep the data up to date. The browser comes with flash support, but is limited by the small screen. However, it does fulfil your browsing needs, if you don’t mind the visual experience. The phone supports WLAN connectivity for faster Internet speeds. But there is no built-in GPS receiver or pre-loaded maps..

Fun-tastic

For the music enthusiasts, the phone has a music player and FM radio with RDS. The music player turns out to be of the same standard, which is generally associated with most XpressMusic devices. The songs can be sorted as artists, albums, genres and composers. On the music enhancement front, it comes with aset of equaliser presets, which you can edit or even create new ones. Bass boost and stereo widening have also been thrown in. The sound quality of the phone is great, both through the headphones as well as loudspeaker. FM radio comes with RDS support and the reception is good. It also has an option of Internet radio so you can listen to the radio stations around the world. Pre-loaded Shazam app works as a TrackID to get you all the information related to a particular track. Playlist DJ is another application that profiles the songs on your phone as per four moods - joy, passion, anger and tempo.

The 5.0-megapixel snapper comes with fixed focus, the rationale behind which we do not understand. With autofocus becoming staple by the day, a fixed focus camera doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, there are the usual scene modes like automatic, portrait, landscape, sports, etc. You can use self-timer and the camera also lets you take sequence shots based on time intervals. The picture quality is as good as what any 5.0-megapixel fixed focus camera can give. The camera is also capableof capturing VGA videos @ 15fps however, much can’t be said about the video quality. You can download applications for your X-5 from the Ovi store. For some additional fun, the iconic PC-Man championship game has been thrown in.

The battery backup of the phone is good. One full charge can last more than a day with constant Email, one hour of music, one hour of calling and a couple of hours of WiFi.

Alternatively

The Nokia X5 is priced at Rs 9,400. Other options that you can consider are LG BL20 for Rs 9,400 and Sony Ericsson 10,700 costingRs 10,700.