Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic review

Release Date:  Q3 2009
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• No 3G

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The Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic handset is Nokia’s latesr edition to the already crowded ExpressMusic range. On the front of the Nokia 5530 is an impressive 2.9 inch TFT touchscreen which uses 16 million colours to make the user interface a joy to use. The 5530 XpreessMusic is fairly light at 107 grams and is only 13 mm thick. As you can tell from the picture to the left this is a very pretty handset and comes in a variety of different coloured casings. There is a choice of red on black as pictures, Grey on Black, Yellow on white or for the girly of all girls, Pink on White. There is a built-in accelerometer for auto-rotating the screen and handwriting recognition built-in, these tools should make using the impressive screen (well, for XpressMusic anyway) a joy to use. Inside the 5530 XpressMusic is 70 MB of storage plus 128 mb of SDRAM which will help you run multiple applications at the same time. MicroSD™ cards are also supported up to 16 GB. Nokia are throwing in a 4 GB MicroSD™ card when you purchase this phone. Powering the 5530 is a standard 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery providing up to 336 hours of standby or 4h 54 mins to be precise of talk time. Impressively if you are using the music player you should get 27 hours out of the battery.

Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic - Camera

On board the Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic is a built-in 3.15 megapixel camera with Nokia impressive Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and an LED flash to brighten up those dull photos. You can also film your own video at 15 frames per second. There isn’t a second camera for video calling but we are struggling to see the point of this second camera at the moment, added cost which users are not utilizing.

Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic - Applications

As you would expect from a XpressMusic phone the main feature on the Nokia 5530 is the music player. Included is a stereo FM radio which fully supports RDS is you prefer to listen to the radio than your own music. The media player will support a huge array of file formats so you have to be pretty unlucky to have file formats that it does not support. For a full list of the formats supported see the specification below. As with every other XpressMusic phone we have seen there are dedicated media player controls making the media player extremely easy to use. At the touch of a button (or touchscreen in this case) you will be able to access many of the media players controls. The 5530 has stereo sound speakers which produce very high quality music if you want to unplug the headphones and let your friends listen too. The TV-out connectivity on the Nokia 5530 allows you to plug your mobile phone into a TV and show friends your videos. These could be something you have filmed or the music video to your favourite tune.

If you prefer to control your handset by voice then voice commands and dial are supported by the Nokia 5530. These would be great features to use if they worked, from my experience of previous nokias the mobile phone struggles to understand my commands, maybe it’s my voice! The document viewer is very useful if you need to view documents on the move, or perhaps want to revise on the move, there are a massive range of uses. The document viewer that comes with the 5530 XpressMusic will let you view Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe PDF files. It is possible to surf the internet on Nokia 5530 via the HTML/xHTML web browser which also supports RSS feeds. Unfortunately 3G is not supported so don’t expect web browsing to be up to speed with some of the latest smart phones no the market like the new Nokia N97. Connecting to wireless LANS/hotspots is easy via WI-FI® which with no 3G may be even more important on this phone than others. For connecting to local devices around you make use of USB or Bluetooth® depending whether you want wired or wireless connectivity. Both of these connections are version 2.0 which is faster than version 1.0. Alert types like ringtones and text message alerts can be in vibration mode or polyphonic or MP3 ringtones. We would recommend you use one of your own MP3 tunes as you ringtone as it is free compared to downloading paid for polyphonic ringtones.

Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic Review – Summary

If you are a music fan then the Nokia 5530 ExpressMusic could be the phone for you. This is a decent handset and looks the business. The big downer for us is no 3G but this handset is competitively priced so we cant expect to get everything. If you do have a little more money and want a music phone then you should also checkout the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.