Nokia 5310 XpressMusic review

The 5310 XpressMusic is Nokia's answer to Sony Ericsson's W880i Walkman phone. It is extremely slim measuring just 10mm and has handy music playback buttons on the front.

Our handset was supplied by Carphone Warehouse who offer it for free on contract or from £120 on pay as you go.

Strengths
The 5310's slim profile is a refreshing change from the rather bulbous 5300 -- its closest stablemate in the XpressMusic range -- but it shares that handset's row of music buttons that are found to the left of the screen. The screen itself is rather large and dominates the front of the phone. It's also very bright and boasts a crisp resolution of 320x240 pixels, which makes text and icons look very sharp.

The menu system is very easy to find your way around and like all Series 40 phones, the Active Standby screen is turned on by default. It gives you quick access to commonly used functions via a carousel menu and also displays other handy information such as upcoming appointments and the name of the track currently playing on the music player.

Naturally, the music player is the phone's key feature and it's pretty easy to use. Your tracks are sorted into the usual artist, album and track name categories so you can quickly find the songs you want to play. The phone only has 30MB of built-in memory, but our handset came with a 2GB microSD card providing loads of room for tracks.

The sound quality is impressive, although you'll probably want to replace the standard headphones that come with the phone, as they're not as good as they could be. However, replacing the headphones is made easy by the standard 3.5mm headphone jack found at the top of the phone.

The handset also supports Bluetooth with the A2DP profile so you can use it to stream your tunes to a wireless headset or wireless speaker system. The battery life is pretty good, as you'll get around 5 hours 30 minutes of talk time from it and it'll keep running for around 12 days on standby. There's no faulting the call quality either, as the speaker and microphone sound crisp and clear.

Weaknesses
Nokia may be gunning for the W880i with this phone, but while the handset shares that model's slim profile, its build quality falls somewhat short. Whereas the W880i's metallic finish looks and feels very sturdy, the 5310's plasticky case doesn't give you much confidence that it'll stand up to many knocks and scrapes. Also, although the Nokia music player is reasonably good, we still don't think it's as easy or as straightforward to use as the Walkman application on Sony Ericsson phones.

The 5310 runs on the Series 40 operating system, so unfortunately it won't be able to take advantage of Nokia's new Ovi music and game download store when it launches later this year. As the phone lacks 3G support, downloads would be painfully slow over its GPRS or HSCSD connection. Users will, of course, be able to download tracks from Ovi using their PC, before transferring them across to the phone, but that kind of defeats the whole object of the Ovi service.

Conclusion
There are currently a huge number of music phones on the market and to be honest the 5310 doesn't really stand out from the crowd. The handset may be slim, but the case feels quite plasticky and the range of features on offer is nothing we haven't seen before. It's a decent phone, given its relatively low price of £120 on pay as you go from the Carphone Warehouse (or free on contract), but certainly not an exceptional one.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Jon Squire