Nokia 5220 XpressMusic

Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is set to play for it all in the mass market segment. A bunch of music niceties, slim waistline and novel design are crowned with the XpressMusic logo, and that's enough of a commitment to cool sonic experience. The gentle price tag only makes things all the sweeter.

But the new XpressMusic mid-ranger needs to make an epic run. It follows in the wake of Nokia 5310, which the house claims to be the best selling music phone in the world with more than 10 million units sold globally. So, no wonder we start this review with a bag full of mixed feelings.

Nokia 5220 is priced quite close to Nokia 5310 and, while obviously positioned below (model designation), it manages to outperform it in quite a few tasks. Well then, besides exploring the newcomer today, we will also be trying to resolve a rather challenging XpressMusic dilemma for all music-loving fans out there.

Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is breaking free of the traditional bar form factor and that's a nice attempt to spice up the XpressMusic portfolio and turn up the youthful appeal of the lineup. It's a lower midrange handset alright, but it's a style statement in its own right.

If it's megapixel count and ample touchscreen that gets you excited, you are bound to look elsewhere. But the Nokia 5220 offers a truly music-rich experience at an attractive price tag. If that's your game, hop on and let's see how cool is saying no to symmetry.

Key features

-10.6 mm slim and lightweight body

-Exciting asymmetrical design

-Tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support

-S40 5th edition user interface, FP1

-2" 256K-color display of QVGA resolution

-Ambient light sensor

-Hot-swappable microSD card slot, 512MB included

-Snappy 2 megapixel camera (with NIPS low light optimization)

-Decent keypad

-Nokia Maps

-Yahoo! integration

-Nice set of enjoyable games

Music features:

-Dedicated music keys

-Music light effects

-Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

-Dedicated music chip

-Stereo loudspeakers

-Stereo Ringtones

-Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)

-Stereo FM radio with RDS

-Large capacity battery

Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is a nice music-centric offering that stays on the path of the most popular music handset by Nokia - 5310 XpressMusic. What could've been an utterly unassuming handset was it not a tad askew, surprisingly manages to address many of the issues of the higher-spec'd 5310. So much so that making the choice between the two seems a tough call now that their price tags are pretty similar.

S40 user interface One of the benefits of the S40 UI is the active standby mode. Instead of looking at a plain and boring wallpaper image, you can opt for a more practical layout that turns the standby screen into more of a PC desktop.

The active standby mode consists of several parts that can be edited or relocated to match the user preferences. In the most common case, the top area is reserved for instant access to favorite functions. The central area provides instant access to the music player. And at the very bottom you will see the calendar events set for the current day. A cool S40 feature, that even Nokia smartphones lack, is the possibility to add a note to the active stand-by. The two soft keys' functionality can also be altered if necessary.

The main menu in Nokia 5220 classic can be visualized in four different ways: a grid of icons with or without captions, a list of items, and tabs. While each of them has its pros and cons, our personal choice remains the typical grid view with legends, showing a matrix of 3 x 3 icons. If you prefer more icons to appear on screen, you can go for the grid view without text, as it displays a 4 x 3 icons grid.

As usual, the menu items are intuitively accessible through keyboard shortcuts. The color background of the entire menu, as well as the wallpaper on the display, can be easily modified by changing the active theme.

The menu responds quickly, without lagging or holdups.

There are six predefined ringing profiles on Nokia 5220. These should be enough to suit practically any situation you could possible face. The seventh profile is the Flight mode, which turns off all transceivers on the phone. This can turn out very convenient if you decide to use your phone as an MP3-player-only for example.

Furthermore, as opposed to some other brands of phones, the flight mode can be used without a SIM card inserted, which we find convenient.

Browsing images is fine No significant changes in the gallery were made with Nokia 5220. That's a pity, as we aren't really in love with the looks of the S40 gallery. Probably a part of the problem is that it is used as a file manager too.

The Nokia 5220 XpressMusic has 30MB of built-in memory expandable via microSD memory cards. The 5220 officially supports cards of up to 2GB of storage, but as we managed to personally confirm, our retail unit didn't have any problems handling an 8GB card.

The S40 Gallery has three different views: list with details, list and grid. Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it to see more detail. Zooming itself is not the fastest around (especially for larger images) and doesn't allow a picture to be zoomed in too closely, so actually it is not much of a help.

The usual XpressMusic player Without doubt, the music player is among the most important applications in Nokia 5220. No wonder Nokia have put some effort to its development. Not that they have made any great improvements to the functionality but the new looks are really nice and go well with the overall design of the handset.

The dedicated music keys are also a boost. They are used for controlling both the music player and the FM radio, their functionality at a given time depending on the last used application. As we already said, the keys backlighting blinks to the rhythm of music if you enable the music light effects option.

Besides managing all the typical functions, the music player also sorts songs by artist, album and genre. The player is customizable through a number of skins.

Naturally, the A2DP profile is supported, allowing listening on stereo Bluetooth earphones. If you don't like the headset that comes in the retail package, you can easily change it for another thanks to the standard 3.5mm audio jack.

But moving back to the player, we have to say that it offers a large number of configurable options. The sonic experience can be enhanced by an equalizer and a stereo expansion function. There are 7 preset equalizers on Nokia 5220 but you can easily modify two of them to suit your taste.

If you get bored with the music you have on your Nokia 5220 you can try the FM radio. It shares the audio player interface and can be skinned using the same themes as the music player. RDS is supported too.

Unlike the Nokia 5310, the FM radio in the 5220 doesn't feature the Visual Radio that enhances the radio experience by adding graphics and visuals to the audio content broadcast by Visual Radio compatible stations.

The video player of Nokia 5220 is compatible with 3GP and MPEG4 formats. Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, as well as fast-forwarded or rewound. The possibility to remove the soft key captions to make better use of the full screen view mode also improves the viewing experience. Still the 2" screen seems inadequate for truly enjoyable video.

Audio quality is good As a music-centric handset, Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is supposed to excel in terms of audio quality. As it turns out it is quite up to the task. It's perfectly on par with its sibling - the Nokia 5310. They both have excellent noise levels, dynamic range and fare quite well when it comes to frequency response.

On the other hand the Nokia 5220 has rather high IMD and THD levels even at the maximum volume level - and their values will increase even further as you lower volume levels. Still these are not all too disturbing, so in terms of audio quality, Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is good enough.

The camera hides a trick or two The Nokia 5220 XpressMusic is equipped with a 2 megapixel camera with image resolution of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. There's no flash, and there's no auto focus.

The camera is more of a complimentary feature on the music-centric 5220.

Typical of Series 40, the camera settings are not the richest around but are still reasonable for this shooter. They include white balance settings, three quality levels going form basic to high, and various effects. Sequence shots and shooting in both portrait and landscape mode are also among the available extras.

There are a few things to frown at - there is no cover to protect the lens from scratches, the lack of a flash rules out night portraits, while the fixed focus is sure to ruin any attempt at a close-up.

The lack of a dedicated camera button is another downer when it comes to operating the camera. It is quite uncomfortable to use the confirm button of the D-pad for that purpose, especially when shooting in landscape mode.

The camera itself is not the best we have seen either, but it's above average and image quality is clearly better than what Nokia 5310 and Nokia 6500 classic can pull off.