Camera Phones Plaza

Nokia 5310 is a bar-type design model, which is made out of quality materials. The dimensions are relatively small, the thickness of the mobile is only 9.9 mm. The phone has a weight of only 71 grams. The height of 103.8 mm and the 44.7 mm width are not a record, but these make out of Nokia 5310 a terminal that finds its place even in the tight pockets.

The keyboard has well defined points of contact and its use does not require too much time for accommodation. The directional key facilitates the navigation through the menu. A strong point of the terminal is the keys located on the left side, near the screen, that are dedicated to control the music player. These buttons are easily identifiable by touch, so changing songs or stops playback can be done without removing the phone from the pocket.

On the top, you can see, near the audio headset, the light sensor with a role in adjusting the brightness of the display and the keypad depending on the ambient light. The 3.5 mm audio output is placed on top of the phone, avoiding the cable tangle in your pocket.

The 5th edition of the 40 Series interface comes with the same intuitive settlement of the facilities on the menu. The menu can be displayed in several forms and different sizes of icons and font. Open it by pressing the center navigation key. The icons and their animations have not been modified. All four directions of the navigation key can be shortcuts to different applications or key functions. In addition, the 2 soft-keys that are on the left and on the right can perform the same function.

The audio quality during calls is good, signal losses were almost nonexistent during the tests, even in areas with low coverage, the terminal behaved well. Instead, the external speaker is not as strong as it should, and it feels especially in noisy environments where it can be hard to hear the ringtone.

The address book supports up to 2000 contacts (more than enough) to which you can add a picture; the contacts can be organized into groups. The call register retains the last 20 calls dialed, received and missed. The voice commands are present and voice recognition is very good. The messaging includes the ability to send SMS and MMS, and even an email client is present that can send an email directly to an email address of a contact.

While all this sounds good for Nokia 5310, it must be said that on the autonomy of the battery things are not so good. Although on paper they look very good - the standby time announced by Nokia is 300 hours, meaning more than 12 days - actually I have not really managed to use this phone more than 4 days without recharging. Instead, the autonomy of the battery in the music player mode is up to 18 hours (officially; unofficially it can hardly pass 14).

Thanks to a new improved audio chip, the audio quality is very good. At first sight, the media player on the Nokia 5310 makes us think to Sony Ericsson's Walkman series. And this is not far from the truth, the people from Nokia are obviously making efforts so that Xpress-player performance is close to the main competitor. First, its facilities include playlists, sorting by albums and an 8 presets equalizer. The supported formats are MP3, Midi, AAC, eAAC and WMA. The music can be played either on the external speaker, but not as loud as we expected, or using the headset that came with the phone. Its quality is good, but for those who really want to have the best audio quality, this 3.5 mm audio connector makes it possible to use other superior quality headphones. In addition, because of the A2DP support, you can listen to your favorite music using a Bluetooth wireless headset. We cannot forget about the FM radio, which uses the same interface with the music player. RDS support is also present.

Although the display size are not exactly optimal for viewing videos, the integrated video player left a good impression. This runs films or videos in 3GP and MP4 formats. It is possible to view them in full screen mode. With a 2 inch diagonal and a QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels), the screen that Nokia 5310 is equipped can display 16 million colors.

As we are dealing with a dedicated multimedia phone, and especially for music, it is clear that more memory is required. The internal memory is only 30 MB, but it can be extended with a microSD card up to 4GB. Moreover, in the package is included a 2GB card.

The phone supports hotswap, that means you can enter and remove cards without the need to stop it. One negative point is that the cards slot is below the cap that covers the battery.

The camera comes equipped with a 2 megapixel sensor, that can capture pictures at resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. The quality of the pictures is not so good, especially in low light conditions, and the video quality is mediocre. The resolution at which it can film is QCIF 176x144 pixels, a shame considering that Nokia offers VGA video recording on identical camera models (Nokia 6234, Nokia 6280).

Nokia 5310 is a tri-band model, which unfortunately lacks 3G. Internet browsing is made at speeds of up to 177kbits/sec or through GPRS in areas without EDGE coverage. As a music player that wants respect, the terminal has Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP profile support, which makes it possible to connect to Bluetooth stereo headphones. The connection to the computer can be done wirelessly via Bluetooth, or through the microUSB port connected to a data cable. Although we have only GPRS and EDGE, the internet browsing and the download are pretty fast, thanks to the integrated Opera Mini browser. The integrated browser makes it possible to surf the WAP and HTML pages. The page loading speed is good, but again we have to complain about the lack of 3G and a display a little more generous in size.

Besides the typical features of the organizer, this model comes with several useful preinstalled applications. The converter is probably one of the most useful of them, but let us not forget the wallpaper creator. Thanks to Java support, the application package may be extended depending on the needs of everyone, and the Nokia Download center helps us to find exactly what we want.

It is clear that Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is a great mobile, that includes many facilities and meet the multimedia demands of a very broad class of users.