Nokia 5700 XpressMusic review

This XpressMusic handset from Nokia stands out from the crowd thanks to a twisty section at the bottom that rotates through 180 degrees to switch between a standard keypad and one with dedicated music-playback buttons. As it runs Nokia's Series 60 operating system, the 5700 also boasts some impressive smartphone features. It's available for around £275 SIM-free online.

Strengths
As you would expect from a phone from Nokia's XpressMusic range, the 5700 is a dab hand at playing back your music tracks. It comes with a pair of sound-isolating headphones that cope easily with either booming basslines or shimmering cymbals and the onboard music players supports plenty of formats, including MP3, AAC and WMA.

Surprisingly, the tiny built-in stereo speakers are also capable of producing a decent racket, so if you wear a hoodie, the 5700 will happily help you annoy your fellow public-transport users with explicit R'n'B.

Our handset came with a hefty 1GB microSD card for storing tunes, and we were impressed with the way the phone allows you to hot-swap cards -- something many rivals can't cope with. Track transfers from a PC are also speedy using the mini-USB slot located on the phone's right-hand side.

The phone runs Nokia's Series 60 smartphone software, so you get some cool extras, such as the RealPlayer applet for watching videos and a neat Web browser. This takes full advantage of the phone's 3G download speeds and renders pages neatly on the excellent 320x240-pixel colour screen. As ever with Nokia handsets, the texting features are first-class and standard stuff such as the contacts book and calendar are a cinch to use.

Weaknesses
The handset uses Nokia's standard Series 60 music player, which can be very sluggish to respond to commands. When you press the play/pause button it sometimes takes a second or more to carry out the command. Often you think the button hasn't been recognised so you hit it again, only for it to pause playback and then suddenly start again. It's similarly slow to respond to the track skip buttons. After a while you find yourself longing for the speedy music player found on Sony Ericsson's Walkman handsets.

Although the rotating keypad is one of the phone's key selling points, it's actually rather clunky to use. This is because there's a significant lag between rotating the keypad and the handset launching the application that's meant to be selected.

Even the 2-megapixel camera is below par. Although it performs reasonably well when taking snaps in strong sunlight, it's useless for taking indoor shots. Even with the strong flash switched on, the resulting snaps are marred by washed-out colours and a ridiculous amount of speckly digital noise.

Conclusion
This handset pumps out great-sounding music, has good smartphone features and an excellent screen. The whole experience is marred by the sluggish music controls and the iffy camera, however. If we were after a music phone, we'd pick one from Sony's Ericsson's Walkman range instead -- the slim 3G  W880i or the W950i, with 4GB of onboard memory, are good alternatives.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide