Nokia 5700 XpressMusic

Nokia's XpressMusic range is young. I looked at the slider 5300 XpressMusic back in February. Before that I examined Nokia's 3250, also an XpressMusic handset, this time with a swivelling numberpad. And now I have the 3G, Quad-band 5700 XpressMusic - a sort of hybrid of those two mobiles that has the slider 5300's looks and the 3250's swivelling lower section.

The main selling point of this mobile is its music and video capability and that is where the swivelling comes into play. The number pad section twists through 180 degrees allowing you to have either the 1 to 9 keys or a set of music and video control buttons facing front. With the number pad facing front the 5700 XpressMusic seems fairly unremarkable. The handset sports an ordinary looking S60 home screen, with Active Standby applications waiting for you to select them.


You can digit-dial calls as you would on any other phone. There are two softkey buttons, Call and End buttons and in their centre a miniature joystick for moving about. I never find mini joysticks to be entirely comfortable to use, but this implementation is a perfectly acceptable example of its type.

The phone comes in two main colour schemes (although a khaki green version is mentioned too). In each case there is a fair amount of white plastic involved, with a band of colour flashing alongside the screen on the front of the casing and forming much of the back cover. This band houses two further buttons towards the phone's outer edges. On the left is the Nokia menu key, on the right the Clear key.

Everything except the number pad remains facing front when you do the twisty thing and bring to the front a pad containing two enormous forward and back buttons and a central play/pause button. Do this and the S60 music player automatically runs and you can choose a playlist, song, artist, album, genre or composer.


The pause/play button has a camera icon emblazoned on it, and this is what you use to snap photos or shoot movies. In this mode the forward and back buttons activate the camera zoom. The camera software automatically runs when you swivel the keypad section through 90 degrees.

This swivel section also houses the lens and flash for the built-in 2 megapixel camera on one of its sides. You can face the lens either towards you or away from you, the camera software inverting the image on the fly so that it is the right way up on the phone's 2.2 inch, 320 x 240 pixel, 16 million colour screen.