Nokia 5500 Sport review: Smartphone for active lifestyle

Touch it!

Use touch control to evade frequent pulling the phone out of the clip on your belt. Not only sport applications are possible to manage by touch, but also the music player and SMS reader. Touch control is very simple: a triple tap on the keypad runs music (attention! The music player must be at least minimized, that is, must be active), a triple tap on the right or on the left side of the phone takes you to the following or the previous file respectively. Running with the phone placed in your pocket and the music player being on is not recommendable, because playing gets frequently interrupted and reactivated as the body of the phone meets with one’s leg. Touch system in case of incoming messages or in the sport mode is quite similar to the one described above.

Setting control functions through mere tapping

Before you start to use the Sport mode you need to set up your own measures in the Sport application, which are then stored under a password so that no one else but you can change them. One’s own measures help achieve better results while one accomplishes their preset training plan. Results are stored into a folder called Diary, where they can be opened and viewed through general or graphic images whenever you need to check them. The last item from the Sport menu that should be mentioned is the so called Tests. Here you will find a detailed description of two physical-condition tests.

   
Personal settings • activities of the month • ...and of the day • activity graph

Nokia Sports Manager (download available here) is a supplementary program for the application Sport. It copies measured values to a PC. Nokia Sports Manager appears as another item in the menu of Nokia PC Suite. Data gets imported automatically once the phone has been connected and the corresponding application activated. On one hand Nokia Sports Manager offers a rather limited number of options; on the other hand, however, this enhances the work of the phone memory without data loses.

 
Nokia Sports Manager

Nokia 5500 Sport is ideal for users who frequently do outdoor activities in the evening and tend to come back home late as it disposes of a LED activated by a press-hold on the asterisk key located on the top of the mobile. The light produced by the LED is not so intensive to show you the road in the middle of the night, but it is sufficient for use in a closed dark space.

No competition on the horizon

Nowadays most current mobile phones try to compete with common technical products in photographing, music reproduction, quality elaboration of work applications etc. With its new 5500 Sport model Nokia has entered a new field – sport. The phone features interesting new functions, which will both surprise and please many users. Yet, I think that Nokia 5500 Sport will probably remain a disappointment rather than a success for real sportsmen. For example, the phone does not have a Bluetooth sensor for pulse measuring or speed recorder for horse riding. Data are collected through a general motion sensor only suitable for approximate measuring or checks. Professional sportsmen will probably go for Nokia 5500 Sport as for a smart and resistant mobile device, but I doubt they will ever make use of its sport functions. Common sporttesters remain far more precise, offering a greater amount of measuring options.

Due to its OS Nokia 5500 Sport scores higher than any other current heavy duty mobile phone. In this sense it can be compared or confronted with smartphones only. The official price of the phone is ˆ300. The strongest competitor of Nokia 5500 Sport is expected to be the cheaper musical Nokia 3250 or the smartphone Nokia N72 (ˆ30 more expensive). Nokia 5500 Sport is, however, the ideal choice for those who want a resistant phone with the latest OS.