Nokia 5300 review: Hop on the music express

The vast fields… of the phonebook

Nokia 5300 offers 1000 contact positions, which is twice more than the phonebook capacity of Nokia 6233 for example. As usual with any Nokia's phonebook, it can be organized in three different views: as a standard list, as a list of names with numbers, or as a list of names with pictures. Searching is performed by typing the first letters of the respective name. The phonebook can be ordered and searched either by first or last name. You can choose a default contact list - the one on the SIM card, the one in the phone's memory or both simultaneously.

Phonebook: different contacts list views

Contact details can include five types of phone numbers, addresses, notes, a picture, a ringtone, etc. There is a field for entering a contacts birth date but there is no option to transfer it directly to the calendar. A nice feature though is the possibility to use video files as personalized ringing tones for contacts of your choice.

Some of the contact details fields

If you prefer not to customize each individual contact, you could organize some contacts into groups and assign ringtones and pictures to the individual groups. When setting the ringing profiles you can select which groups will be able to reach you on the phone - in this way the groups serve as call filters.

You can freely use the voice dial feature of Nokia 5300 for all the contacts since it needs no voice tag recording. If the required contact has more than one number, Nokia 5300 uses the default one after letting you choose for a couple of seconds. It is quite a pity that the number type cannot be selected with an additional voice order.

An interesting option is that besides Voice dial, you can use the Voice commands option, which is again speaker independent and can be used for voice control of a total of 16 preset phone functions like turning on or stopping the FM radio, the Infrared port reception, etc.

Various voice commands

Calls management

The number of missed calls appears in a window on the main display. From here you can get to the corresponding log, where calls from the same number are grouped in one item accompanied by the date and the time of the last executed call. The same principle is applied for dialed and received calls as well. Each folder can fit in up to 20 items. And that is not everything. Nokia 5300 also offers a cumulative Calls Log, in which all call types, including multiple tries are organized in chronological order. You will also find a list of the recent Message recipients, as well as a counter for all sent and received messages.

Call log menu • call log list • message log

Messaging gets better and better

Nokia 5300 works with SMS, MMS, emails, and Push-to-talk. In addition, it offers two special types: sound MMS and instant SMS. The instant messages appear directly on the main screen.

When you start a new message, first you are offered the opportunity to enter the recipient's number and then you can start typing your message.

In comparison to previous S40 Nokia phones where the message is started on a single line which gets extended further down on the whole display as the message gets longer, this time the place for typing is already stretched onto the whole screen. Messages are sent in the background which is really nice.

Messaging menu • new SMS message • available graphic emoticons

When asked to type the recipient, you may type their phone number straight away, select it from the phonebook, browse groups, or look it up into the list of people, whom you have recently sent a SMS. The last option is particularly useful as people tend to write messages frequently to several contacts, which are in this case directly accessible. The editor counts down written characters and informs about the number messages that will be sent. T9 dictionary is also there to assist you and offers an extensive vocabulary.

Notifications about SMS delivery can be activated both individually for separate messages and generally for all outgoing ones. They appear on the display for a while and then get saved in the phone memory. The Delivery reports are stored in a dedicated folder, which makes their deleting quite easy when their time has come.

Nokia 5300 features the new version of the MMS editor, called "Multimedia Plus" which shows you the exact content of the message that the recipient is going to receive. So making previews as in older Series 40 Nokia models is no more necessary. MMS can contain text, a picture with a size of up to 1280 x 960 pixels, a sound clip, a video record, a business card, and a note from the calendar. Multiple-page MMS are available as well.

The email client in Nokia 5300 is a java application and thus takes a bit longer to start; it is generally slower and it is not perfectly compatible with the rest of the applications in the phone. Nevertheless, the email client cannot be considered bad. It has POP3 and IMAP4 support. The email client copies email addresses from the phonebook and works with attachments. At the same time messages cannot be sent from the email field in the phonebook. Automatic download of email message is not available either. The email client offers automatic account configuration for the most popular email services providers but as it turned out with the Gmail it's far than perfect and needs further fine adjustment.

There is no limitation in the size of the attachments to be sent. There is, however, a limitation to the size of the attachments that are going to be downloaded from the server. This limitation is user configurable but only up to 300KB. There is also a Spam filter which works by blacklisting the email addresses that you no longer want to receive mail from.

New email message • new email message options