Nokia 5700 review: Smart performer

Phonebook... sky is the limit

The phonebook of Nokia 5700 is just like a normal Nokia Symbian phonebook. It has no limit of the contacts, as it uses the phone's free memory and can thus hold an enormous amount of entries. They can be ordered either by first or last name and can be searched by letter-by-letter typing of the desired name. The phonebook can be accessed by the joystick in stand-by mode or from the main menu.

The phonebook brings no news

An unlimited number of fields can be assigned to any new or existing contact. You can add each field as many times as you like, which gives you the option of assigning 3 or 4 mobiles to a single contact, for example. Editing a field's name is also allowed if you would like to assign a field that does not already exist. Naturally, you can assign ringtones and pictures to contacts of your choice, and in this case even a personal video clip can be attached. Synchronization with PC works seamlessly, too.

Editing a contact: should the enormous number of different fields prove insufficient, you can create your own

The Calls log of Nokia 5700 contains three tabs for Dialed, Received and Missed calls. Every tab can hold up to 20 call records with their date and time. However, if you enter the Log application, you will find yourself in a list of all calls, which have taken place in the last 30 days. This includes even data connections and the messages sent and received in that period. Log length can be reduced to save some memory space, but it is not that memory-consuming anyway, so it's very unlikely that you resort to that.

Typical Symbian call log

Messaging

We have already mentioned that Nokia 5700 is aimed at the young, and texting is surely an age thing. Given its target, it's important that the phone scores well in the SMS department. We were glad to discover that it completely lived up to our expectations. For a non-QWERTY keypad that is, because it can hardly match the efficiency of its business orientated contemporaries - Nokia E70 and Nokia E61 for example. But among standard numeric-keypad devices 5700 scores great. We have already explained the benefits of the keypad, so we're not going to go in any more detail now.

Typing a message is easy thanks to the great keyboard and the intuitive interface

The SMS editor displays a counter of the characters left of the 160 limit. It also displays in brackets the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending, should the single message character limit be exceeded. The display allows 6 lines to be shown en bloc. If activated, delivery reports popup on the standby screen when the keypad is not locked. After that, they are stored in a separate folder in the Messaging sub-menu.

The MMS editor is very intuitive and easy to use. Nokia 5700 works with POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. The email client can download headers only, as well as full messages. Attachments are also supported. This email client manages most user needs regarding email communication. There is also an audio message recorder in case you want to send someone a voice note.

Symbian developers have done a good job with the MMS and the audio message composers

E-mail client works like a charm

Music player - no novelties

Considering its XpressMusic label, with Nokia 5700 we expected something totally different (read: better) from other Nokia devices. As it comes out this is not completely true. The player is quite usual indeed. It has not undergone any innovations or significant changes compared to other Symbian 3rd edition devices. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and WMA. The controls of the player are very intuitive. It also manages the M3U playlist format perfectly and can even handle the file automatically if it is placed in the same directory as the tracks. Users can use card readers for transferring music to the memory card but the phone's own USB port is just as fast and thus a much more convenient solution. Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts for scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds all of them to the music library.

Music player - nothing has changed

The player comes with four different equalizer presets but it also allows altering them or creating a new one. These can come in handy because the phone sound quality has an obvious flaw - the severe lack of bass elements. That can be partially compensated for with the equalizer. On the other hand the phone is doing very well with the high tones. This is especially true when you listen to music through the earphones that come in the retail package. These are also very comfortable and with a long enough cable that allows to put the phone in a pocket even at you knee level. Same as with Nokia N76, the music player of Nokia 5700 cannot be switched off once it is started. Not that it slows down the phone noticeably, but still having a program that you don't use running in background and consuming precious RAM is not that good.

Equalizers can really improve sound quality

The phone also supports the A2DP Bluetooth profile allowing listening to your favorite tracks on stereo Bluetooth headphones. This is easier said than done though, as we faced a lot of difficulties trying to pair our Nokia 5700 with a Motorola headset we had around. We never succeeded to get them to work properly, but this is probably an isolated case. Still, if you have a stereo Bluetooth headset on your mind - you'd be better off if you test its compatibility with the Nokia 5700 before handing the cash.

The last components of the music installation of the device are the loudspeakers. Positioned in a way that makes them stand on one side when the dedicated multimedia keypad is active they produce great stereo sound of good quality, though not as impressive in terms of volume.

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The last components of the music installation of the device are the loudspeakers. Positioned in a way that makes them stand on one side when the dedicated multimedia keypad is active they produce great stereo sound of good quality, though not as impressive in terms of volume. The Samsung D900 loudspeakers produce much louder noise for example, although the latter isn't dubbed a music phone. Having said that we really loved the sound coming from the loudspeakers - rich and deep enough it manages it impress when compared to any other handset we've reviewed.

Nokia 5700's musical side - both speakers are on the left side when you flip the multimedia face on top

Nokia 5700 comes equipped with Real player and Flash player. The video can be played in fullscreen also. We already mentioned that if you rotate to 90 degrees, the phone will lie on its side but we couldn't help ourselves pointing it out again, as this is an interesting design solution indeed. In this position it would be really comfortable to watch a video while the Nokia 5700 lies on your desk.

Video player is nice and intuitive, going fullscreen once you flip the swivel

Flash player has no extraordinary traits

Gallery - old but gold

Nokia 5700 doesn't have the 3D rotating gallery of the N-series smartphones. Images and videos are presented in list view only. Other than that, there are no differences in terms of functionality. You can view the pictures and videos both in portrait and landscape mode, as well as in full screen with no visible borders at all.

Gallery is nice but is missing the 3D view of the N-series

Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it up to 800% and view it in great detail. The actual zooming is also very fast, in line with the overall performance of the smartphone. So is every aspect of the media-related performance of Nokia 5700.

Zooming a picture reveals great details and is very fast

Otherwise the gallery has a nice file-management functionality, meaning that you can select and send multiple files. Besides, the smartphone has the usual file manager that does a pretty decent job when it comes to filtering files according to the memory used, and marking, moving, copying and managing files. As for application management, there is also a separate Application manager. The latter is very familiar as it doesn't differ from other Symbian devices.

The file manager has always been a handy feature of S60 Symbian phones

Regretfully, Nokia 5700 doesn't feature one especially useful application - "Search". This means you have to spend extra time in organizing your applications, unless you want to end up with a mess that will take ages to deal with. Anyways, you can always download it additionally from the Nokia's website.