I had the pleasure of using a Nokia 5300 over a 3 day weekend for a first look and wanted to write up my experiences. I’d like to thank Nokia Canada for allowing me to use the phone for the weekend.
Please note
This is a beta product and as such my usual review will not be applied here.
This is just a heads up to what’s coming from this unit on the Rogers lineup in February.
I will do a full review once I obtain a retail 5300
First Impressions
quick specs
Triband NA 850/1800/1900
262k QVGA screen
Series 40 3rd generation
USB connector for Media transferring
Rubberized sides and back
Class 10 EDGE
USB 2.0
physical look and feel
The first thing that came to mind when I held the phone was that it looked rugged. People that saw the phone over the weekend had varying comments as well ranging from “cool” to “kiddish”
The 5300 that I had access to was well built. All the lines flowed nicely and there were no huge gaps or looseness in the battery cover or build quality of the phone. This is what impressed me the most because the 5300 I used was definitely not new. It had most definitely been passed around as evidenced by a little paint wearing off the END button.
Slide
Even after all the usage this demo received the slide mechanism had positive action in both directions and the phone didn’t creak and moan like some other phones as they age.
The Slide answered / Hung up on callers when opened and closed. What it didn’t do, nowever, was cancel out of what you were doing and return you to the home screen. I would compose a SMS for example, send the message, slide it shut and the send dialog box would still be there until I pressed end. I don’t’ know if the retail, finalized version of the 5300 will continue to to this or not, but if it hasn’t been decided I think the option would be great. Just like you can set the slide option to answer/hang up to on/off The ability to cancel all of what you were doing when you close the slider should also have an option so you can turn that on if you like, or turn if off if you don’t.
Volumes earpiece / loudspeaker
The 5300 is LOUD
The earpiece was nice and loud, but had a slight hiss. Whether or not this shows up on the retail piece I’ll know later. The speakerphone and external ringtone volume of this unit was ridiculously loud. W600 loud. You’ll easily be able to hear this phone ring in a noisy environment and on top of this, the classic Nokia AGC (automatic gain control) appears to make it’s appearance in this handset as well boosting the volume of the earpiece in noisy enviroments.
For those of you looking for the next loud phone similar to the W600 the Nokia 5300 should fit that bill.
Aesthetics
Screen
The screen on the 5300 is a nice large QVGA (240x320) unit that display’s colour and text brilliantly. It’s also a reflective unit as most Nokia handsets and can be seen outside and in sunlight.
Keypad
The keypad was excellent. Nice big keys, easy to feel out and easy to use. They pressed just enough for my liking and provided enough tactile feel.
Camera
The Camera on the 5300 is a 1.3mpix unit that took a decent picture and has nokia’s famous nightshot as well. While this isn’t a finilazed unit I don’t think the camera will get worst with retail SW so here’s 2 shots. One with se K510 and the other the nokia 5300:
K510:
5300
Size
The size of the 5300 is medium. It’s not tiny, but it’s not huge either.
I like it personally.
Take a look @ this comparison:
General comments and usage
After using the 5300 proto for a weekend it’s clear that, even in proto form, the 5300 will polish up to be a nice device. At $79.99 on a 3 year term with a 1 gig mem card on the Rogers memory offer you can’t go wrong.
The 5300 / 6085 also allow you to turn the phone on without a sim card inserted. This is an extention of the Plane profile, but still a good feature to have so you don’t need to insert a dummy/dead sim when you want to demo this phone to customers or your friends. For example.
Final Thoughts
After using the proto for the weekend it worked well for me.
Battery life was average but I’ll touch on this with the full retail review as this, again was proto. The RF seemed fine with no issues and the keypad and slide mechanism were quality pieces. I took quite a liking to this phone and look forward to it’s full review in the coming weeks.
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