My Valentine Day's Gift - Nokia 5300 Xpress Music

Hmm.. so after almost 15 months of juggling around with Nokia 6021, I finally decided to go for a new mobile phone partly because it looked quite old (but probably the real reason was that I got bored of it). So what better way to do so, than by getting the same as gift from my dear wife :-).

So after a day of browsing on net, and visiting 3-4 shops we finally settled for Nokia 5300 Xpress Music (http://www.nokia.co.in/nokia/0,8764,98256,00.html) for Rs 11,400. The contents of the package besides the customary mobile, battery and travel charger were a 256 mb miniSdCard, Stereo Headset, Data Cable for attaching the mobile to the PC , CD and a 3.5 mm earphone adapter. The first impression of the phone is that while not slid open its quite compact, and you can do most of the music operations and some of the dialing functions in the same manner. Of course for dialing in some numbers or typing some characters you need to slide down the phone to open the keypad. Contrary to the expectations the sliding operation was quite good. So all in all has this been a good buy ? Following are my observations after using the phone for a couple of days....

Pros

• Looks are awesome
• Display at 256 k colors is great at bright. A good screen size(320 X 240) works to its advantage.
• Dedicated music keys for playing, changing tracks, volumes etc. comes in quite handy and are addictive :-)
• Comes with some neat application and games (like Mp3 cutter, 3d Soccer etc) in its 256 mb card.
• If you are a real music freak you can use the bundled 3.5 mm audio adapter to plug in any normal Earphone to the mobile.
• 1.3 MP camera with the phone does give good results, but a 2 MP+ camera would have been desirable.
• Combo memory with 32 MB flash and 16 MB RAM though not great but is decent enough. But on a new phone with pre installed applications you get about 5 MB of free space.
  

Cons

• The Nokia guys could have done something to give the mobile a more non-plasticy look ;-)
• I was unable to find a way of creating play lists from within a mobile (It can be done easily via Nokia PC Suite though). From a XPress Music edition making play lists was definitely required.
• Headphones could have a better quality. With the bundled headphones the bass is not good.

Some Glitches in the Phone

1. While transferring music onto the phone via buletooth or USB cable at times we get an error message that the destination space is full (whereas the memory card still has a decent amount of space left.) Works fine, when I transfer the files considering the phone as a normal external drive and not using the Nokia Music Manager.
2. Another interesting bug which I found is that, whenever the phone is in Silent Profile and I am listening to music or Radio then in that case as soon as I make the GPRS connection the volume autmatically turns mute (though the music is not paused). Not too sure though whether this is a bug or a functionality which I am not able to understand.
3. Till now I am able to create playlists from within the phone, but am able to add a max of one song in that phone :-). Funny I guess - probably I have missed something here......

Overall, looks a decent handset to buy with the price tag it holds.