Review of Nokia 5730

5730 is an all in one promising phone: music, web, gaming and connectivity. As the name suggests the phone belongs to the xPressMusic family. 5730 is actually a tough competitor for the owners of E75. The reason for it being compared with a successful business model is that, the support for corporate mails, QWERTY keyboard design, dedicated music keys, elaborate organizer, the office package and GPS and many more. 5730 really embarks a doubt on who are the targeted audiences.

Inside the Box                                                                                                                                                                                           The box more or less looks like the usual trendy xPressMusic family. With colored bubbles on the outer side of the box and the inside of the box is decorated by the mobile and its accessories. Accessories include: charger, USB port, Headphones, Nokia Suite CD.

Design and Construction                                                                                                                                                                      Nokia 5730 has been designed pertaining to the rules that have been framed long time back, that would be common to all the xPressMusic editions. 5730 is not a touch based phone and the front panel space is shared between the 2.4’’ display and keypad. One feature that has been included in this model, which is not seen in the other models, is the availability of a LED at the centre, which serves to indicate missed events or a standby breathing light.

There are six keys around the D-Pad, Call and End Keys. The End keys serves as Power off and On. The other two soft keys serve for Menu and backspace. On the left side of the screen, has the music control buttons lined up.  They are well spaced, easy to touch supported by a white backlighting, unlike the four other keys adjacent to the keypad which make it little difficult to use. The left side of the phone has the USB port, which is protected by a cover, since these are little stiff you need to show your nail power to open them. The right side of the 5730 features two controls – the volume rocker and the shutter key. While it has full functionality, including half-press for autofocus and camera launch, it is small and poorly designed.

The 3 mpx camera lens is as usual placed at the back of the phone. The camera is not covered by any lens.

Display is an extra ordinary feature of the phone. Even though the colors get washed out in direct exposure to sunlight, the legibility remains undisturbed. Phonebook is highly recommendable. Has a large space for storage and can be sorted by the order in which you want it to be displayed. Messaging has always been the best feature that has been available right from the basic models available in Nokia.  As far as mails are concerned the users can set up a time interval between which the mobile automatically checks for new mails, and informs.

It wouldn’t be far on my part if I don’t comment on the Music player in this phone, then the review would be incomplete. The phone supports most of the latest music formats and also dedicated keys make it easier to access the files, play, pause, and stop. The player comes with five equalizer presets and, should they seem insufficient, you can edit them or create new ones in a matter of seconds. The best feature available in the phone is “Say and Play”, where the user can pre-record the voice and next time when the name of the song or artist which was pre-recorded is said, the player fetches the son automatically. In built FM has a capability to automatically detect stations and save them.

Camera is good, though there is no shutter to cover the camera lens, the quality of the picture is pretty acceptable. “Multi Shot” is yet another good feature, which keeps capturing images consecutively 6 images or more until you keep holding the shutter key or the memory is full.

On the whole the phone is a E series phone wrapped in baggie pants and headphones. The designers mustn’t have struggled too long to build 5730, since its very evident that all the available technology has been pulled and put together beneath which the QWERTY keyboard is kept hidden.  Unlike the other xPressMusic models, this phone has really been very challenging; it has been traversing the paths of N and E series models. Hope it yields Nokia success and its customer satisfaction.

Key features

• 2.4″ 16M-color TFT display of QVGA resolution
• Four-row side-slide QWERTY keyboard
• Symbian OS with S60 3.2 UI
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• microSD card slot, 8GB microSD card prebundled
• 3.2 megapixel auto focus camera with a dedicated shutter key, geotagging and VGA video at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with UPnP technology
• Built-in GPS receiver and preinstalled Nokia Maps
• USB and stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) connectivity
• FM radio with RDS plus Internet radio
• Dedicated music keys
• N-Gage support
• Dedicated gaming keys
• Ovi Contacts integration
• Office document viewer
• Smart dialing
• Contacts bar on the homescreen
• N-Series-like gallery
• Nokia Say and Play (voice control to music player)

Main disadvantages:

• Fingerprint-prone cheap-looking plastic build
• No DivX/XviD support out of the box (can be installed, possibly requiring a purchase)
• Average camera performance
• Poor battery life
• No TV-out functionality