Music Explodes on the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic Phone

So last night I went to the Edison Ballroom in Manhatten for the ‘media event’ launching the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone. There was food, drinks (lots of them blue) and live performances by K.i.D Cudi, Chester French and music by Kid Capri. Obviously this was organized because the Nokia 5310 has a dedicated chip for Music. In that setting (LOUD!) I was not able to listen to what music sounds like from the phone, but I did watch as a CD was being ripped onto the phone via it’s USB cable. But I get ahead of myself. I came a bit early and once in I took a few pictures of the floor and the bar.

But what got my attention was several kiosks with the 5310 attached to laptops The first thing you notice is how SMALL this phone is!

and how REALLY slim it is

They are getting very good at packing alot of features into small packages. The left side of the phone has dedicated music keys – play/pause, forward, and rewind – for instant access to the stored songs. The Music Player can play MP3, Midi, AAC, eAAC+, WMA formats and has support for skins and album art. If you have enough music you can listen for 18 hours. And you won’t get bored visually because the phone has Exchangeable music themes. Plus, if you want music not stored on the phone there’s FM radio.

To handle all this music the Nokia 5310 comes with Combo memory which includes 64 MB flash and 32 MB RAM. As is the custom with such phones this one comes with a microSD memory card slot. You can use a 4 Gig card which should be plenty room for lots of music, pictures and videos! Rumors of being able to use an SD card up to 8 have been heard, but I can’t swear to that. Ya didn’t hear it from me (unless it’s true). The only annoying issue is that the memory card slot is found under the battery cover so it’s not easy to access. I’m one of those people that likes to access data off the card by poping out the card and using a card reader so this phone would make that less convenient, but heck. It’s not the end of the world.

The screen display is 16 million colors True Color 240 x 320 pixels. As I was playing around with it navigating around seemed fairly easy and has the usual features like calendar, Alarm clock, Calculator, and similar features. All things which are useful and used often with one’s phones these days. I did notice that if you left the phone alone for a shot time the Lock Keys took effect and I believe this includes the music keys. That means you have to Unlock everytime you want change something while listeing to music. As I said before, it was impossible to test the audio features on this phone because of the setting in a club with music swirling around.

I noticed there was a camera so I figured I’d try that out. The 5310 has a 2 mega pixel camera with 4x digital zoom – there’s no flash or auto focus. PLus there’s a Video Recorder but I didn’t get to experiment with that. I think I was chasing one of those Blue Drinks called “Purple Rain”. They used Bombay gin. Very smooth! Oh, yeah, the camera….I used one of the Effects (Solarize or something like that) and took a picture of the stage.

Click the thumbnail to see the full picture right from the Nokia phone – 960 x 1280 pixels. It took a little bit of effort to get this image to me because we couldn’t just slide out the CD card. We tried sending a message but the signal wasn’t very good in the Ballroom (this is Manhatten so don’t expect me to explain that!). We were not having any success with going through the laptop (I always carry my flash drive. ya Never know!). I think it was a Windows problem, but then we tried sending via Bluetooth and THAT worked! I just turned on my Bluetooth and the Nokia found my phone and sent the image. Yippy!