Nokia X5-01 review: Round the square

Organizer and apps

The time-management skills of Nokia X5-01, like most other Symbian handsets, are impressive. Just name the application and you can bet the handset has it.

We start exploring the rich application package with the calendar. It has five different types of view - monthly, weekly, daily, Agenda and To-do, and five types of events available for setting up – Meeting, Meeting request, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Every event has its own unique fields, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar

Mobile office is also very well supported with preinstalled applications able to view Word, Excel, PowerPoint (including Office 2007 files) and PDF files trouble-free. Unfortunately, editing isn’t supported out of the box. The final ingredient here is the included ZIP manager, which allows extracting archived files straight on your phone.

Nokia X5-01 displays .doc .xls .ppt and .pdf files seamlessly

The X5-01 sports a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. The Active Notes application is also on board allowing multimedia content to be added to your notes.

Converter, calculator, recorder, active notes

The alarm application allows you to set a huge number of alarms, each with its own name, set-off day and repeat pattern.

Setting up an alarm • The World clock

The Nokia X5-01 features a dictionary with a very rich database. English comes preinstalled but you can also download dozens of other languages for free off the Nokia website.

A message reader can read your SMS and email messages out loud, which is a great option for drivers.

The dictionary

If the gallery file-management options (which even include sending multiple files at a time) is insufficient you can use the file manager. It allows you to do almost anything you can think of with your files. Copying, moving, creating new folders – you name it and it's a safe bet that the file manager can do it.

The file manager is great

The useful "Search" application is also aboard the Nokia X5-01. The application itself finds almost every item in your handset containing a given keyword. From messages to landmarks, every bit of data is checked and then all results are displayed on the screen.

Every bit of data is checked by the search application

The Nokia X5-01 also comes with Ovi Files. However, there isn’t much sense in that since the service is being discontinued as of 15 October 2010.

Ovi Files is gone

The social side of the Nokia X5-01 shows when you go into the Internet menu – you’ll see many familiar names like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on. Only Facebook gets a dedicated app, the others are just shortcuts to the networks’ respective web pages.

The Facebook app is available out of the box

The Nokia X5-01 also comes with some preinstalled games – PAC-MAN Championship Edition, Dance Fabulous and a demo version of California Gold Rush. You can get some more games from the Ovi Store.

PAC-MAN Championship Edition • DanceFabulous

Ovi Store

Speaking of the Ovi Store, it’s easily accessible right off the phone as well as via a desktop browser. You can download the apps straight to your smartphone or transfer them later on from your desktop computer.

The structure of the Ovi Store client is simple – the general view lists apps with their names and category, plus the price and user ratings.

The Ovi Store

Selecting an app, gives you more details - a description, storage footprint plus reviews by people who have tried it.