The Nokia 5700 combines the look of the Nokia 5300 and the form of the Nokia 3250, but it has a lot more features than either of those two. So what’s it like?

The Nokia 5700 is a Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1 smartphone. It’s being sold under the XpressMusic sub-brand, which emphasises music and multimedia playback.

The Nokia 5700 is a monoblock phone which weighs 115 g. It has a casing made of glossy white plastic, and a black or red matt plastic middle section. There’s a rubber flap on the right hand side which covers a microSD hotswap card slot, USB port and charging jack.

The keypad is rather unusual, it can be twisted to four different positions, each allowing easier access to a specific function of the Nokia 5700:

- Keypad facing forward: this is the main mode of the Nokia 5700, which works just like keypads on any other phone.

- Playback controls facing forward: twisting the keypad round to this position automatically activates the music player.

- Camera facing away: this position automatically starts the camera application, and lets you photograph or video objects in front of you. If you’re already using the phone’s video player app, twisting to this position automatically changes the video to horizontal full screen mode, and it’s physically possible to stand the Nokia 5700 on its side in this position so you can watch the video more easily.

- Camera facing forward: this position also automatically starts the camera app, and is intended for self-portraits and for videophone calls. This position also lets you stand the Nokia 5700 horizontally on its side so you can talk to the video camera without having to hold the phone.

The main keypad itself has clicky buttons with angled surfaces that let your finger distinguish one from the other. Above the keypad are the soft keys, call keys and S60 keys which generally work fine. However, the S60 menu key is somehow too closely connected to the left hand soft key, and occasionally you find yourself accidentally activating both. The Nokia 5700 has a joystick, and joysticks seem to divide opinion: some love them and some hate them. It’s a matter of taste, but as joysticks go the 5700’s is perfectly adequate, with a smooth metal finish that doesn’t dig into your thumb the way the E61’s joystick does.

There are volume controls built into the left side, and the on/off button is on the top of the phone.

The playback controls are physically excellent, a vast improvement on the tiny buttons of the Nokia 3250. The Nokia 5700’s controls take up as much space as possible, so they’re as easy to press as possible.

The QVGA (240×320) 16 million colour screen is bright and crisp, with a sensor that turns the lighting on or off depending on how bright the surroundings are. You can set the sensor to various sensitivities, or switch it off, and you can also adjust the screen’s auto switchoff time from 5 to 90 seconds.

Battery life is what you’d expect from a smartphone, and will vary wildly from one user to another depending on what they do and how much they do it.

Overall the Nokia 5700 feels surprisingly solid, despite having a major moving part. The twisting keypad is very sturdily implemented, and doesn’t feel loose at all. The phone isn’t quite as chunky in real life as it might appear from the photos, it’s much thinner than the Nokia 5300 for example. The curvy edges give it a nicer appearance than the Nokia 3250, and the multimedia controls are far superior.

As a Phone

The Nokia 5700 is a Quadband (850/900/1800/1900) GSM and WCDMA/UMTS (2100) 3G phone, and as far as calls go it’s up to the usual high Nokia standards.

The Nokia 5700 has a speakerphone mode, and also supports all current bluetooth headset profiles including A2DP stereo. You can take calls (or redial the last dialed number) through A2DP-compatible bluetooth headphones with built-in microphones. Testing this feature with the Nokia BH-501 bluetooth headset, the callers I spoke to reported that I sounded just like I was using a phone normally.

If you have a 3G connection available, you can use the videophone mode, for which you have to twist the camera to face you and hold the Nokia 5700 horizontally. The twisted mode also lets you rest the phone horizontally on a table. You can also use the camera to record and send multimedia messages.

As a Music Player & Radio

Accessing The Nokia 5700’s music player is extremely intuitive: you just twist the playback controls round to face you, and the player application activates automatically. The controls themselves are very easy to use, with one large and two enormous buttons. To go back to the phone’s standby screen, you just twist the normal keypad back to the front. The music player is compatible with a wide range of audio standards (AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, M4A, WMA, Mobile XMF, SP-MIDI, AMR (NB-AMR), MIDI Tones (poly 64), RealAudio 7,8,10, True tones (WB-AMR), WAV) and you can transfer tracks using the Nokia Music Manager or Windows Media Player. The Nokia 5700 has a hotswap microSD memory card slot, which can use microSD cards with a capacity up to 2 gigabytes.

The Nokia 5700 has an FM radio tuner, which like all phone FM tuners requires headphones or external speakers to be plugged in to act as the aerial. The Nokia 5700 also supports Visual Radio if you have access to it.

The Nokia 5700 has support for 2.5mm headphones that plug straight into the audio socket, 3.5mm headphones through an adapter, and stereo Bluetooth headphones. The sales package includes a 3.5mm adapter, which also has its own set of external music controls, and some 3.5mm headphones to plug into the adapter.

Sound quality is very good on the Nokia 5700, although it is largely determined by how good your headphones are. If you’re an audiophile, I’d strongly recommend using your own favourite headphones. The included 3.5mm ones have good sound quality but seem to limit the volume, and using third party alternatives made the music much louder. You can use third party headphones through the 3.5mm adapter, or wirelessly through a BH-500 Bluetooth adapter. The Nokia 5700 has built-in stereo speakers, which are mounted along the left side of the phone in music mode but spread on the left and right sides of the phone in normal mode. The speakers are pretty loud (the phone shakes if you hold it at maximum volume).

The Nokia 5700 is compatible with the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which lets you listen to music wirelessly through A2DP stereo Bluetooth headphones. It also supports the AVRCP Bluetooth profile which lets you change or pause tracks wirelessly. If you haven’t tried Bluetooth stereo headphones before, I’d strongly recommend giving them a go. As long as they’re A2DP compatible they should work with the Nokia 5700, even if they’re not made by Nokia.

What’s puzzling about the Nokia 5700’s music features is that there’s no built-in 3.5mm headphone socket. This is by far the most common standard for headphones and audio cables, and although the 3.5mm adapter is perfectly good it’s still another bit of kit that you have to remember to take with you. The Nokia 5700 isn’t the thinnest phone on the market, and it seems likely that Nokia would have been able to fit a 3.5mm jack somewhere on the phone, but for some reason they haven’t done it.

As a Video Player

The built-in RealPlayer application handles video playback, or you can install third party alternatives such as SmartMovie. The 5700’s twisting ability comes into play, as you can twist the keypad round so that the Nokia 5700 stands horizontally on a tabletop, which also automatically puts the video player into full-screen horizontal mode. You can twist back and forth between horizontal and handheld mode as much as you want, and the video continues to play. Video quality on the built-in player is excellent, and should provide stiff competition for third party playback apps.

The Nokia 5700 is officially supported by Nokia’s new Video Manager PC application, which lets you convert existing video files on your PC into files suitable for playback on your phone. The first version of Video Manager was shockingly bug-ridden, however a new version has come out pretty quickly after the first one, and presumably Nokia will continue to issue regular updates as more and more compatible phones appear in the market.

As a Camera

The Nokia 5700 has a 2 megapixel camera which can be activated by twisting the keypad so the camera faces away or towards you. The screen automatically goes into horizontal mode, and pictures are taken by pressing the white Camera/Play button in the centre of the playback controls. The Forward and Back controls zoom in and out using the digital zoom facility. The camera includes a flash. Twisting the keypad back to its normal position deactivates the camera app automatically.

The camera can also shoot video at 320×240 pixels, the resolution of YouTube videos. The Nokia 5700’s web browser is good enough to let you access the normal YouTube website and upload videos just as you would on a PC, and the 3G connection means you can upload large files fairly quickly.

The camera application has the following options: Image Mode, Video Mode, Panorama Mode, Night Mode, Flash, White Balance, Colour Tone (normal colour, sepia, black and white or negative), Image Quality and Image Resolution.

As a Computer

The Nokia 5700 is a S60 3rd Edition FP1 multi-tasking smartphone, and is compatible with S60 3rd Edition applications and games. You install apps just as you do on previous S60 3rd Editions, most easily by using the PC Suite’s Application Installer program. You can also download and install apps straight onto your phone over the internet, for example through the built-in Download! application or through the phone’s web browser. The Nokia 5700’s browser is the now-standard Nokia S60 OSS browser, and you can download at broadband speeds thanks to the phone’s 3G connection (although page rendering is slower than on a PC). The Nokia 5700 runs the FP1 update of the S60 3rd Edition user interface, which contains new features and improvements over the ordinary 3rd Edition.

One rather worrying thing about the Nokia 5700 happened two or three times during the first week I had it: it inexplicably decided to reboot in the middle of using an application. I wasn’t running any third party software, just the apps that came with the phone (for example the built-in City Bloxx game), and this is something that never ever happened to me with the almost-identical 6290. I updated the firmware of the Nokia 5700 and the reboots haven’t happened since, so hopefully the problem has already been dealt with.

The Nokia 5700 contains a 369MHz central processor, almost twice as fast as the processor found on something like the E61. It’s difficult to compare The Nokia 5700 to phones like the Nokia N95 however, as Nokia N95 contains two processors instead of one, so even though it has a lower clock speed than the Nokia 5700 it might actually be faster at getting tasks done.

Conclusion

The twisting keypad is much more than a novelty, it’s genuinely intuitive, innovative and useful. Twisting the music controls to the front in effect turns the Nokia 5700 into a dedicated music player. Twisting the camera away from you lets you hold it more steadily to take better pictures. Twisting the camera towards you makes it a very convenient videophone or video diary camcorder, as it can be placed on a table and has exactly the right angle to film your face.

The unexplained reboots and occasional instabilities are worrying, although they were rare and some may have been eliminated by the latest firmware update. The lack of a direct 3.5mm headphone socket is a bit silly, especially when absolutely everything else is in place to make the Nokia 5700 a direct alternative to dedicated music players. The horizontal screen mode in the video player and camera app is very welcome, but it would have been nice to see this extended to the web browser as it has been on the N95.

Is the the Nokia 5700 the phone for you? It’s a matter of your technical requirements and taste. It doesn’t have every smartphone feature, but its relatively low price tag reflects this. It does look quite quirky and isn’t a thin phone, but some people prefer having something chunky, brightly coloured and with a unique character. To use a car analogy, the Nokia 5700 is perhaps the smartphone world’s Mini Cooper.

[Reviewed by Krisse from All About Symbian]

 

Store & Price Comparison

Store	Offer Details	Price
	Nokia 5700 XpressMusic GSM Quad-Band Cell Phone Unlocked In Stock	Price: $299.00
	Nokia 5700 Unlocked GSM Cell Phone In Stock	Price: $386.99