If there is one thing that should be said on behalf of Nokia, their phones are always changing; alive with color and design.  The Nokia 5530 XpressMusic is no exception so let’s get down into it and see what makes it a great (or not) buy.

nokia-xpress-music-5530-4

Design

The 5530 XpressMusic is a touch based phone so we will start with the screen. The screen size is 640 x 360. This gives you much better resolution and more than enough room to navigate the device. It can display over 16.7 million vibrant colors. You can input information into the 5530 by either using your finger or the pen that comes with the device. I found that using the pen on this device was a little more difficult than using your finger, but it still serves it purpose. The 5530 also features brightness control, which comes in handy when moving from indoors to outdoors.
The dimensions of the device are 104.0 x 49 x 13 mm, and weights about 107g, so it fits snug in your handbag, pocket, or purse without taking up much space. Just because the device is a “touch” phone does not mean that it doesn’t need any good-old-fashion plastic buttons. Nokia knew this and has graciously provided us with power, volume, camera, keylock, and dedicated touch key buttons.
To find all the colors this phone comes in I had to refer back to nokia.com and the colors are: black with red accents, white with blue accents, white with yellow accents, black with grey accents, and white with pink accents. So really, there is a color for everyone, unless you’re razzmatazz type of thing.
The phone comes with 70mb of available internal memory, a microSD memory card slot that supports up to 16GB, and a 4GB micro SD memory card. The camera on the 5530 packs 3.2 megapixels, 4x digital zoom, an LED flash, and saves pictures in JPEG format. There is so much info on the cam that I could not include all of it. But all BS aside it is just a regular 3.2 megapixel so don’t expect Samsung Omnia quality photos from this thing.
As the name suggests the phone comes with a lot of music capabilities so Nokia didn’t do us any favors by including a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack and built in FM radio (that’s expected).

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

Performance

If you’re into physical keyboards, don’t look here, but the 5530 features two types of on-screen keyboards which are pretty easy to use with a little practice. First one is the standard full screen QWERTY keyboard; the keys are pretty big so I had no problem texting or just writing in general. The second the alphanumeric keypad works just fine I also and no problem with it. Nokia also included a handwriting function which I do not see the need for, as I found it a bit hard to use and some of the letters that are closely shaped got mixed up and came out as the wrong letter. It is a nice idea however.
Music playback is supported for almost all the major file formats including mp3, wma, MTP, etc. The quality for music playback was better than expected. The 3D surround-sound stereo speaker’s work, but not as good as I would like to see on a phone dedicated to the music lover.
Web browsing on the 5530 XpressMusic is about as good as you are going to get from any touch screen music phone, and the web browser supports the major mark-up languages like: HTML, XHTML, and WML. The dedicated facebook client also works without any glitches as far as I I have tested.
Battery life: Talk times ranges from four to five hours, standby time up to 351 hours, video playback 4 hours, and music playback about 27 hours. These are not bad times considering the device is running off a BL-4U 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery so you should do fine, and if you need, you can always get an extra battery.

Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a phone to help you catch up on business while on the go this is not the phone for you. On the other hand if you are a fun loving pleasure seeker with a love for music than by all means go out and pick one up. Just remember to pick your colors wisely.

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