Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Nokia 5800 vs N97

The Wife got her Nokia 5800 XpressMusic handphone last weekend. It’s the much publicized phone that Comes with Music. Opening up the box and checking out its included accessories, I was left wondering what was Nokia thinking short-changing their N97 customers. You’d think that after paying a premium for a N97 phone, it should come with everything, but it didn’t. That’s fine if this is Nokia’s new strategy moving forward, but then why do we find the 5800 so well equipped?

The 5800 XpressMusic comes with a stylus in the phone. There is an extra stylus packaged in the box. There is also a guitar pick style stylus too. The N97 comes with nothing. The N97 doesn’t need a stylus to work, so perhaps that’s why it didn’t come with a stylus. But the 5800 doesn’t need a stylus to work either!

Next, the 5800 also comes with the Nokia AV cables. The N97 is missing that. It is not as if the N97 was any poorer in media playback capabilities.

The 5800 also comes with another handphone strap accessory with a cute little guitar. Sure, it is part of the 5800 marketing to flaunt its music capabilities. But couldn’t Nokia think of something for the N97?

That do I think of the 5800? The handset feels pretty light and plasticky. But it otherwise seems like a very good phone. Somehow other people had complaints about the touchscreen sensitivity and responsiveness, but this one here seems okay, even without the firmware upgrade which others reported to have helped improved the touchscreen.

Opening the back cover, something stuck me: The camera was very ‘exposed’. See photo above. The LED of the LED flash is seen in its raw LED form. I suppose Nokia probably thought people don’t really need to open the back cover very much. It is not like many people buy spare batteries and need to swap them around. The SIM card is inserted from the outside. But removing the SIM card requires to open the back cover and remove the battery. For ICT-going people, swapping SIM card is going to be a commonly executed task.

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