Remember the odd-shaped N-Gage? That looked awkward, but at least the shape was justified for gaming on mobile devices. While we applaud Nokia for breaking the design mould yet again in the form of the X5, following the Motorola Flipout and Microsoft Kin One which was discontinued recently, we can’t seem to resonate with Nokia’s chubby square slider. Maybe it’s an age thing since this handset is squarely targeted at teens.

Not to be confused with the candybar X5, which was launched in China April this year, the upcoming X5 (more specifically the X5-01) is a non-touchscreen slider with a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone strangely manages to be compact and chubby at the same time. Just imagine the E72 folded in half and you get a rough idea of how the X5 looks with its extra girth.

Bear in mind that the X5 isn’t Nokia’s first crack at this form factor. The Twist for Verizon in the US was equally weird with a square design that swivels 90 degrees around a ring punched out of a corner of the chassis. To be fair, the square design of the X5 may catch on with the young and hip crowd, especially since it comes in five different colors and custom pouches.

The gently curved back of the X5 is made from metal, which is different from the rest of the shell, and there’s a good reason for that. A new “Surprise Me” feature lets you spin the phone on its back to skip to a random track while you’re listening. We’re with you if you think this gimmicky. The novelty wore off soon after we tried a few spins. Likewise, shaking the phone, which causes it to chime and let you know the number of unread messages you have, was terrifically pointless as well. We can’t imagine using these features in real life. Then again, we’re not exactly the target demographic for the X5, which is aimed at the teenybopper crowd.

Under the hood, the X5 runs on Symbian S60 3rd Edition software with Feature Pack 2, which is on almost every non-touchscreen Nokia smartphone. It’s stable, reliable, but doesn’t excite. If you’ve used a recent Nokia, you’d be familiar with the X5 as well. In some countries, the X5 will have Comes With Music, an unlimited music download service, when the device launches this quarter for 165 euros before tax.

An ARM11 600MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM power the X5. Given past experiences, this Nokia should blaze through most of its tasks. Approximately 200MB of user memory will be available, but that can be increased to 32GB with a microSD card. Like most of the Nokia smartphones, the X5 is relatively well-specced with HSDPA/HSUPA, Wi-Fi, quad-band GSM, Bluetooth stereo and a 3.5mm audio jack, but no GPS.

For multimedia, the back of the X5 is adorned with a 5-megapixel fixed-focus camera with LED flash, a minimum focusing distance of 50cm and an F2.4 aperture. It records VGA-resolution videos at 15fps. The Webkit browser supports Flash Lite 3.0, and the usual services such as Mail for Exchange and Ovi can all be found on the X5.

According to the specifications, the 950mAh battery has a rated talktime of 5 hours and standby time of about 17 days.

By Damian Koh

Design

The look and feel of the E5 is completely different from the current E72. That’s probably more good than bad since the E71 and E72 are barely distinguishable in terms of the hardware. We can imagine Nokia engineers trying to break away marginally in the design of the E5, but still stay true to its E71/E72 heritage.

The E5 weighs 126g with battery included, which is a mere 2g lighter than the E72. But in the hands, the predominant smooth matte plastic of the E5 gives it a gentler, even pebble-like and less sharp appearance. This is complemented with a convex wave contour at the back, which probably added to the girth of the phone. The biggest and probably only hint of metal you’ll get on the E5 is the battery cover. If we could peg a numerical value to the look and feel of the E5, it would be in relation to its cost. The E5 is about half the price of the E72 when this was first announced last year, which means the quality, metallic feel of the E72 has also somewhat been halved.

There are also differences all around for the E5. The spacebar now spans the width of four letters on the keyboard compared with two on the E72. If you look further back, the keyboard on the E5 follows more closely to the configuration of the E71. Holding down the Sym, spacebar and Ctrl keys activates Bluetooth, torchlight and silent mode, respectively. Instead of four shortcut buttons for Home, Calendar, Contacts and Messaging on the E72, the E5 now has just two keys for Home and Messaging. The E5 doesn’t have a front-facing camera since it doesn’t support video calls and the primary 5-megapixel shooter at the back is now recessed, unlike the protruding module on the E72.

The E5 has a 2mm connector port for charging although the micro-USB port could also be used to juice the battery. The latter option would be more convenient for those who want to charge and synchronize their phone with the computer at the same time without running two cables out from the device.

Features

The E5 runs the same S60 3rd Edition software with Feature Pack 2 like the E72. However, there are a number of differences beyond that. The E5 has a lower 18-bit screen color depth (24-bit on the E72), shorter camera focus range from 50cm (10cm on the E72), and lacks an accelerometer sensor. In addition, it has twice the amount of RAM at 256MB and a larger F2.4 aperture (F2.8 on the E72), which hints of better camera performance in low-light conditions. The fixed focus camera on the E5 also has the Extended Depth of Field feature, which increases the distance of the depth-of-field, keeping more objects in focus.
The 1,200mAh battery, according to the specifications, has a rated talktime of 18.5 hours on GSM and standby of up to 29 days. These are pretty impressive figures to boot. The E5 will come with Ovi Maps and free drive/walk navigation.

We’re not too keen on the Home screen shortcuts, which let us place our favorite contacts, messages and a few other applications on the top layer of the interface. They don’t add a lot of value to the experience, but they are there and some people may find it useful.

Outlook

The differences between the E5 and the E72 may not be a lot and, in fact, it may not even matter to most people. Given its estimated retail price of 180 euros, the biggest reason the E5 will catch on with users is the affordability of the phone. The E5 is expected to be available in Asia next quarter.

By Damian Koh

Symbian^3

Symbian 3, marketed as Symbian^3, isn’t the end-road we’re looking forward to… that’d be Symbian^4. Instead, this version of the Symbian operating system is a prelude to Symbian 4, with a software overhaul scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. The enhancements with Symbian 3 are in three key areas: User interface, multimedia and performance. We lambasted the single- and double-tap confusion when we reviewed the 5800 XpressMusic, N97 and N97 mini. It felt as if we were flogging a dead horse back then. Symbian 3 finally addresses this issue by shifting to a single-tap interaction model while adding support for multitouch gestures on the capacitive touchscreen. We don’t want to jump the gun here since we haven’t had the chance to waddle though the menus yet. But if the briefing material is to be believed, there’s a good chance Nokia has finally gotten it right with one of the biggest pain points with earlier devices.

The software has also enabled the multiple home screens feature so users can swipe across the display to switch between three customizable panels, with widgets to access the music player, emails, contacts, news feed and social-networking applications. We’d imagine the look and feel of this to be similar to the Maemo home screen interface on the N900.

Multimedia also plays a huge role in Symbian 3 with support for HDMI output, which means you’ll be able to plug the phone into a TV and watch an HD video sans a Blu-ray player. According to Nokia, video playback via the HDMI adapter cable is rated for 6 hours, though we’re not sure if the accessory will be bundled or it has to be purchased separately. The N8 also has 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, so it should, at least in theory, be capable of running high-performance and graphics-intensive mobile games.

Finally, in terms of performance, Nokia claims the N8 is more efficient when it comes to memory management, which means more applications can run at the same time. The N900 is a good example of this. So if the same kind of experience can be ported over to the N8, it should be something to lookout for. For the record, the N8 has 256MB of RAM and a 512MB ROM.

Features

Aside from Symbian 3, the N8 is also Nokia’s first handset that’s integrated with Qt. To end-users, this probably doesn’t mean anything. But for developers, the software development environment lets them write applications and use these across different platforms with minimal modification.

The N8 takes 12-megapixel pictures and 720p high-definition videos at 25fps. The camera has an aperture of F2.8, focal length of 5.4mm and a Xenon flash. According to Nokia, the N8 is its first 12-megapixel camera-phone and the company claims that the image sensor used is bigger than many of those found in dedicated digicams. So it’d be interesting to see how the shooter performs in low-light conditions.

The capacitive touchscreen measures 3.5 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. One thing Nokia smartphones have never lacked is their suite of connectivity features. The quad-band GSM N8 also supports quad-band WCDMA, Wi-Fi (b/g/n), Bluetooth stereo and Assisted-GPS. It also comes with free walk and drive navigation as well as Lonely Planet and Michelin guides on Ovi Maps.

According to Nokia, users can watch Web TV from channels such as CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic on the home screen. Local content, on the other hand, can be accessed from the Ovi Store.

Wrapping up this section is the 16GB of onboard memory with the option to increase that to 48GB via the microSD expansion card slot. The N8 also has the ability to act as a USB host for transferring data to another USB device.

Outlook

While it’s easy to get carried away with the enhancements of Symbian 3, it also serves as a reminder that nothing else has changed fundamentally. We are still looking for an overhaul in the Symbian user interface and that’s still many months away. Symbian 3 is a stop-gap solution, just as Windows Mobile 6.5 was for Windows Phone 7. It may be better, but meanwhile, competing software are also improving at the same time. On the bright side, Nokia estimates the N8 will retail at 370 euros before tax and subsidy, so it could actually be pretty affordable.

Damian Koh