I’ve shared the top 5 things I love and hate about this little bitty touchscreen smartphone, so now it’s time to dig right in with the full review. We’ll start with hardware today, and move to the software tomorrow. It’s no secret that the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic is a budget-oriented smartphone, but does that mean that Nokia cut corners to keep the price down?
When you first look at the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, the first thing you’ll notice is the 2.9-inch nHD (360×640 pixels) resolution resistive touchscreen display. This display is tuned a bit better than the one on my 5800 XpressMusic, however, with truer colors and a brighter backlight. It’s also much more responsive, which means I don’t have to apply much pressure at all to get my touches acknowledged. This makes for a much smoother experience overall, and is nicely done.
The touch-sensitive buttons along the bottom of the front of the phone are a blessing and a curse. When everything is working smoothly, they’re awesome. One thing I hated about the 5800 XpressMusic was the fact that these keys were hardware, while everything else was touch. It simply ended up offering an inconsistent and slightly confusing user experience. Unfortunately, when things are not going smoothly, these touch-sensitive keys suck. Case in point, at one point while I was reviewing the phone, I installed something (I haven’t narrowed it down quite yet) that caused the phone to crash, hard. It would boot up through the holding-hands animation and load the background, but that was it – nothing else. Since these are touch-sensitive buttons, I was unable to do the three-finger salute on the phone, since it did not recognize that I was pressing the green button.
Along the right edge of the 5530 XpressMusic is the volume rocker, slide-lock key, and dedicated camera button. Like other autofocus phones, this is a two-stage camera button, where you press it slightly to activate the autofocus, and then all the way to snap the photo. Both of these positions are clearly marked by the button when you press it, and it’s a great overall experience.
The 5530 XpressMusic is one of the first Nokia phones in a long time to have all of its connectors located at the bottom of the phone. This includes a standard 2mm Nokia charging port, standard 3.5mm audio port, and the microUSB data connector. Why they didn’t just use the microUSB to charge the phone and ditch the 2mm port is a mystery to most all of us, at this point in the game.
The only thing on the left edge of the phone is a long attached door that covers both the microSD card slot and SIM card slot. The same bonehead who designed the 5800 XpressMusic’s SIM card slot had a say in the 5530 XpressMusic’s design, because it’s the same thing here. You can insert the card without removing the battery, but to eject it, you have to remove the battery and pull out the stylus. This is bonehead because more often than not, when switching phones, I will have dismantled the entire phone before I realized that I could have just opened the door on the side, and consumer confusion is never a good result. The only thing on the top edge of the phone is the power button.
The back of the 5530 XpressMusic houses the 3 megapixel camera and single LED flash, which does precisely nothing when you’re taking photos. This entire back cover simply pulls off to reveal the battery, and it’s as flimsy as a piece of paper, as we discovered earlier. I’ve noticed that quite a few Nokia handsets do not have a release button on the battery door any more, but rather simply require you to pull on it, and I can’t say I really care for this design, personally.
There is, indeed, a stylus included, though even with the smaller 2.9-inch nHD display, the only time I needed it was to eject my SIM card. The rest of the phone is entirely finger-friendly, which we’ll talk more about in the software portion of this review, coming tomorrow.
