Nokia 5630 XpressMusic review: A sharp note

Phonebook is robust

The Symbian handsets have an excellent phonebook with virtually unlimited capabilities. There is storage space for a practically unlimited number of contacts and fields with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

Contacts list • searching by gradual typing • viewing contact details

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one. We personally find it quite a challenge to think of something Nokia has missed here - there's everything from the contact's nickname to their assistant's name and phone number.

Personal ringtones and videos can also be assigned to a contact. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

An enormous variety of fields is available when editing a contact

Synchronization is also nice and easy although you do need the Nokia PC suite (or Ovi Suite as of lately) for things to go smoothly. Sending and receiving contacts via SMS or Bluetooth is also a piece of cake.

The Call log application is another Nokia 5630 strength. It holds up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key on the homescreen.

The call log is there to keep track of your communications

If you enter the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers over the air or even over Wi-Fi. The period can be shortened to save some space but you are quite unlikely to do that, as even with a huge number of calls the log only takes a few miserly kilobytes of memory space.

Messaging and Ovi Contacts

Texting with Nokia 5630 is spot on. With a decent keypad and great software support your correspondence is as good as it gets on this kind of devices. Let's face it, Nokia are targeting the youth with this handset and solid messaging is key for them.

The Nokia 5630 supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. The SMS and MMS share an editor. It is the well known intuitive application from previous Symbian S60 smartphones. It has a counter of characters left up to a limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

Turning an SMS into MMS is as simple as adding any multimedia content

It goes without saying that you can activate a delivery report for messages. The reports pop up on the standby screen and are subsequently saved in a separate folder in the messaging sub-menu. If you exit the message editor without having sent the message, the editor prompts you to either save it to the Drafts folder or to discard it.

All it takes to convert a common SMS into an MMS is to insert some multimedia content. A nice feature allows the resizing of pictures automatically for sending via MMS.

The Nokia 5630 also features a dedicated audio message editor. Although technically a type of MMS, the audio messages have their own separate editor. You can either record the message on the spot or use a previously recorded sound clip.

The audio message editor has questionable applicability

The email client is also very similar to what previous Symbian powered phones have offered. If you are using any public email service (it has to be among the over 1000 supported providers), all you have to do is enter your email address and password to start sending and receiving emails. The Nokia 5630 takes care of downloading all the relevant settings to get you going in no time.

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. There is also support for attachments, signatures and basically most of the things you can think of, so the Nokia 5630 can meet almost any requirement regarding the user's emailing needs. Thanks to QuickOffice, viewing attached Microsoft Office files is a breeze.

The email client

There's also the option to listen to the email - the Message reader app comes with one language and two voices preinstalled (one male and one female) and the option to download more. The application handles this quite nicely and while the voice didn't sound too natural, it didn't trip over difficult words and even managed to read URLs.

Listening to an email • speech settings

Ovi Contacts come preinstalled with Nokia 5630 XpressMusic but you can also install it on most other Nokia smartphones. Ovi contacts integrates tightly with the Contacts list as a new tab and offers an IM client with a twist. You can search for people already registered with Ovi or send an invitation to anybody using Gmail since the Ovi contacts supports G-Talk, Google's own IM, as well.

Ovi Contacts is a very capable IM client

Thanks to this service you will be able to chat in real time with all your Ovi/Google Talk-connected contacts, change your status messages and mood, and all that kind of social networking stuff.

In addition you can even go as far as sharing your GPS location so your friends can view immediately where you are at that particular moment using the Ovi Maps. Or you can share the name and the artist of the track you are currently listening to.

What can we say - it all works exactly as advertized. Your contacts need not have an Ovi-connected phone, they can chat with you just fine over Google Talk.