Nokia's equivalent of the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, the 5310
XpressMusic functions as a lightweight slimline music player, and
shares its layout and music buttons with its fellow 5300 and 5610
XpressMusic phones.
Rocking in with a powerful, pin sharp 16 million colour QVGA display
measuring a neat 2.1" across, the Nokia 5310 is dressed to impress. As
we said above, the 5310 is cut from the same cloth as the Nokia
XpressMusic range, and so the same regulation coloured side strips
housing the dedicated music keys (pause/play and skip back and
forwards) make a return. The exterior of the slimline handset is done
over in a sleek matt black plastic finish, livened up by the previously
mentioned colour strips, available either in bright red or electric
blue. The 320 x 240 pixel screen is bright and crisp and sits above a
large, conventional keypad a 5-way navigation key, and four static keys
– two for call and cancel respectively, and two context sensitive menu
keys.
The handset's key feature is obviously audio playback, and the 5310
does this with aplomb. The sharpness of the sound quality is very
impressive, both on the supplied headphones and the internal
loudspeakers, and the 3.5mm headphone jack allows you to plug in your
own speakers. You can connect a headset or speakers wirelessly using
the phone's integrated stereo Bluetooth. Whilst we're on the subject of
Bluetooth, its worth mentioning at this point that the wireless file
transfer via Bluetooth comes included as does USB for direct transfers.
The XpressMusic player menu has been spruced up and improved on
considerably. There is no change in functionality, it still works as
well as it always did, but it's nice to see that Nokia have made some
effort in terms of presentation. The usual XpressMusic features – 5
band equaliser with 8 presets and the ability to modify and create new
ones, album art display and playlists – are all present and correct.
Dedicated music keys really work best when they are separate from the
main keypad and they are positioned well here on the left hand side of
the 5310's body, as they are on the rest of the XpressMusic stable. The
music player support the usual MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WMA files as well as
MIDI files.
With 30MB of internal memory and a microSD card slot (the 5310 can
handle cards of up to 8GB in size), there's plenty of room to store
music tracks, which are sorted into artist, album track and name
categories. The Nokia 5310 runs on the Series 40 operating system, so
unfortunately, you won't be able to take advantage of Nokia's Ovi music
portal, perhaps the one big drawback of the 5310. Still, there's
nothing stopping you uploading music manually from your computer the
old fashioned way.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the camera featured on the 5310 is a
standard 2 Megapixeler, quite literally nothing flashy. Though it comes
with an ambient light sensor, allowing you to take pictures in relative
gloom, the lack of any form of flash means that decent night-time snaps
are out of the question. The preinstalled Opera mini browser enables
you to browse the web. However, there is no 3G support and connectivity
via EDGE or GPRS is pretty slow.
All that said, the Nokia 5310 is a music phone first and foremost.
The fact that in this day and age in can happily handle 8GB of extra
memory means that this phone can still give the high powered smartphone
crowd a run for their money – audiophiles will be able to pick up the
5310 for peanuts on a pretty cheap tariff and enjoy high quality audio
playback for years to come.
| Make |
Nokia |
 |
GPRS |
 |
| Model |
5310 |
|
3G |
 |
| Air Interface |
GSM |
|
HSDPA |
|
| Coverage (Band) |
Tri |
|
Wi-Fi |
|
| Handset Type |
Standard |
|
Bluetooth |
|
| Dimensions |
45 x 104 x 10 mm |
|
IrDA |
|
| Weight |
71 g |
|
USB |
|
| Talk time |
Up to 5 hours 18m |
|
GPS |
|
| Standby time |
Up to 300 hours |
|
Push e-mail |
|
| Camera |
|
|
Predictive Text |
|
| Camera Flash |
|
|
MMS |
|
| Video Camera |
|
|
E-mail |
|
| Audio Player |
|
|
Memory Card |
|
| FM Radio |
|
|
Java |
|
| Ringtones |
|
|
Browser |
|
| Headphone Jack |
|
|
Organiser |
|
| Games |
|
|
Touchscreen |
|
| Internal Memory |
|
|
Vibrate |
|
| Video Calling |
|
