Nokia 5800: it’s here!

Yes! Finally today I went to the Nokia Flagship store in Chicago to get my very own Nokia 5800! This post is going to be just my first impressions, not meant to be a through review, I’ll leave the nitpicking in specific apps (or lack of) in the next posts.

The good:

• Since the moment I took it out of the box, I was suprised with how small, and how solid the device really is. It’s miles away from my N95, and it lets you know the moment you put your hands on it.
• Box full of accessories! Pouch, stand, 8gb memory card, strap, tv-out cable in a mid-range device.
• +1 Nokia for finally giving me a choice of colors, the Flagship Store had both the red and the blue version of it. I can’t remember the last time I had such a choice. (Perhaps never?)
• Nokia took a page out of the Motorola book and started bundling content with their devices! 29 awesome wallpapers, 8 songs (all different genres, sure you’ll find something you like!) 5 videos (2 music videos, the trailer of The Dark Knight, a promo video of the 5800 and a documentary trailer?
• Talking about content, I really enjoyed some of the tracks that came with the memory card, specially the one that included the music video, Minipop’s Like I Do. (I even caught myself airdrumming to it on the trip back :P)
• +1 for all content being widescreen, great demonstration of the awesomeness that is the screen. And it is awesome, how can something so (relatively) small pack so much pixels! Best screen evar.
• Again on the built in content, all tracks had album artwork. And to think it was just a year ago that my N95 only came with a artwork-less track of Moby’s In My Heart
• That was then I plugged my N95′s microsd, of the 100s of tracks I skipped, the music player detected the album art of all tracks except for one. Huge improvement!
• Battery life ought to be good. I listened to music during all the trip back, and the battery stayed at 2 bars during the whole time. (Using only the charge that comes with it)
• The gap between one track and another while playing is smaller, not truly gapless playback, but close.
• Early reviewers weren’t kidding, this thing is loud.
• And at last the lock switch: it’s so cool. :P

The bad:

• Refreshing your music library still takes foreeeeever.
• Accelerometer powered screen rotation sucks, it was never a good idea, and now I’m forced to use it since there’s no physical way of rotating the screen.
• The games on it are a joke :P
• Oh Nokia, still no option to customize a newly created folder’s icon. :( See how weird my makeshift office folder looks in my menu.
• You can do anything with the touchscreen only, except getting in the menu. Where’s the option to use the standard S60 homescreen with softkeys Nokia? Update 2: You can put a menu shortcut on the active standby bar. Only 4 slots, 6 apps I’d like to put there :P
• Weird stuff that you can uninstall: Welcome, Settings Wizard, Accessory Setup (whatever that is). But most importantly, wtf is with the Myspace shortcut icon?

The other stuff:

• Clever of them to have the screen protective film with those weird markings. If it was clear, nobody would take it off and then they would complain about the screen’s sensivity :P
• And because this sort of thing matters to people, my blue, USA 5800 with the product code 0575384 has these languages.

Now to wait until the transfer of my 7gb playlist is completed. Oh Joy. (at least transfers average in 1200kb/s)

Update 1: Forgot to mention that I’ve been trying all input methods, oddly enough, the full screen keyboard is the one that feels the most awkward to me, alphanumeric and mini qwerty are fine, and the handwriting recognition works surprisingly well! (except for the fact that I never dot my ‘i’s :P)

Oh and click after the break for more pictures :P