New phone: Nokia 5800

In every geek’s life, there comes a day when you just have to let a gadget go. Sometime ago I had to let my good old Nokia N80 go. I didn’t want to, but the speaker died and since it’s a phone and practically silent, I deemed it dead. It was two and a half years old, that’s a lifetime in gadget years. So, there’s the backstory!

I got myself a new phone: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a touch-screen smart phone. Nokia markets the 5800 as a music phone, but I think they’ve got it all wrong. I sure do listen to music on it - almost 8 hours a day - and it’s very nice, but that’s not the bit I am most interested in. It’s the touching and the software. And on a smart phone, software is number 1.

Software

Unfortunately, software has so far been pretty meh. Nokia’s firmware is very true to it’s Symbian roots and the apps supplied with the phone are nothing special. There are no extra-ordinary software for the 5800 just yet. Except for Gravity - which just goes to prove my point¹. If you have a compatible phone I recommend you to try out Gravity this instant.

The lack of software has really ignited a fire within me. I’ve drawn a few concepts and written some code and plan to try out my skills in the mobile software world. Nokia has great options regarding the platform; you can code in Symbian C++, Open C, PythonS60, WRT (HTML & JS) and Flash Lite. Out of these, Flash Lite seemed the easiest to just pick up and go on about. Soon I will hopefully have a few prototypes floating around.

Come back later and check out the Mobile category here on my blog for updates!

5800 in general

Regarding Nokia 5800, it has immense price to quality ratio - cost me a meager 348 euros and I got all the amazing features; touch sensitive 640x360 screen (sharp as a really sharp thing), 8GBs of hot swap storage, 35h battery for music, MMS, GPS, video recording and no artificial bans or blocks or any funky business.

Just hoping Nokia updates the firmware properly so I won’t have to cash my 5800 in for N97 when it’s released. So far, N97’s software looks a lot more mature and if we won’t be getting that kinda functionality on the 5800, it’s bye-bye 5800, hello N97.