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Nokia 5610 Xpress Music

The new XpressMusic line of Nokia music handsets sports some great improvements in terms of marketing strategies and looks more consistent than the company’s initial attempts to take over the music phone market. The explanation lies behind the enhanced functionality and improved design of the newer models. All the three solutions sport different form factors: a classic candy bar, a slider and a rotating-bottom candy bar. A certain similarity in design concepts links the three together, and so do the the implemented technologies and the controls system as well. While the older XpressMusic phones used to sport shocking bright colors (the main color scheme being red and white), which narrowed the target audience to a visible extent, now the company revised their positioning policy and introduced some significant changes to the design of their music phones. The quality of the plastic used is rather high, the new colors inspire a sense of harmony rather than that of shock, the use of the characteristic surface texture and metal pieces inspire an original feel into the new Nokias and eliminate the feeling of cheapness which used to harm the image of Nokia 5200 and 5300. The certain parallels in design are observed with SonyEricsson phones, everything new in the world of music phones seems to be subconsiously assotiated with that particular company and Nokia are cunningly exploiting this. A lingering allusion to W850i is easily felt about Nokia 5610XM, the features and dimensions also having a lot in common.

The new music phone series comprises Nokia 5310, 5610 and 5700, the latter being available on a number of market as a recolored version to keep with the new color scheme of the product line. The biggest marketing focus is put on the new models however, and on 5310 especially, which is now the key product on this front as seen by Nokia themselves. The advertisment campaign of 5310 is especially aggressive. The music phones are adequately priced, which only helps to boost the sales. The youth comprise the most of these products’ target audience, so the price matters more than anything in this case. This is easily proved by the fact that SonyEricsson’s Walkman handsets are rapidly yielding their positions, the company fails to position their product in an adequate manner, mixing different consumer segments, so the sales generally fail no matter how functionally advanced the end product is – either the phones face a severe price cut or the distributors cease to order shipments.

Against the background of the slumbering activities of the rest of market players (save probably for Samsung, which stands at the very beginning of development of a strong line of music solutions), Nokia looks like a winner, offering music phones in all market segments (in this case we don’t only mean XpressMusic but hi-tech and fashion N-series devices alike, and N81 8GB in particular, which is the company’s musical flagship by now). The changes in the XpressMusic marketing policy aren’t limited to the design revamping, a lot of other details were exposed as subjects to revision and improvement. The main points of this campaign include:

Introduction of comfortable dedicated player controls
Long-lasting playback cycle in terms of battery life
Implementing DSP units to improve the overall audio quality
Windows DRM
Easy phone-to-PC synchronization by utilizing standard miniUSB slots
Mass introduction of the standard headset sockets (3.5mm)
Enabling support for SDHC memory cards
Collaboration with the world’s leading accessory producers
Reasonable price policy
Putting an XressMusic logo on every model in the line, which is meant to increase the trademark’s popularity in some obscure and mystical way

Of course, not every existing model falls subject to every of the above listed rules, but this will change.

Nokia 5610 XpressMusic main specifications:

Dimensions: 98.5 x 48.5 x 17 mm
Weight: 111 g.
Casing material: Plastic + anodized aluminium pieces
Frequencies: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, WCDMA 850/2100, EDGE class 10
Screen: 2.2″ QVGA 16 M colors
Camera: 3.2 Mp, Auto-focus, flash
Memory: 20 Mb, microSD 512 Mb card bundled, up to 4 Gb supported
Battery life, continous MP3 playback cycle: BP-5M 900 mAh, ~22 hours
Radio: Included, RDS supported
Headset jack: 2,5 mm jack
Remote control set: included
Release date: November 2007
Guiding price: 300 euros

Now let’s get down to a more detailed examination of the new models. Our upcoming article will be entirely devoted to Nokia 5310XM, summing facts up that one is very close to 6500 classic, while Nokia 5610XM is designed after Noki 6500 slide. Such an expansion of the company’s portfolio is extremely profitable, the developers only need to introduce a few changes to an existing concept proven by time, which means much lower development costs. This both reduces the resulting market price of such models and approximates the release dates.

Player controls

Nokia was the first company to pioneer the usage of dedicated player controls back in times when they were lagging behind SonyEricsson with their Walkman series. Since then Nokia pays a lot of attention to the comfort of player controls, this stands true for music and non-music solutions a like, camera and business phones included. Most model come with additional buttons whose dedicated purpose is that of providing a more straightforward control of player and multimedia elements. It’s pretty obvious that pressing a dedicated button is much easier than doing a number of menu manipulations with the regular navigation buttons. All of the Nokia music phones sport dedicated rewinding buttons as well as those performing Play/Pause and player launch functions. The presense of such extra controls is an important factor influencing the consumer’s choice in a big way. Another important feature of the dedicated controls is that you can switch between playing tracks without having to quite the menu you’re currently in. There are a lot of possible locations used for placing these buttons, varying from the backside of the rotating block or the slide panel to positioning them along the sides of the screen or around the navigation buttons. But one thing that always remains true is that having dedicated controls regardless of their ergonomics and location is much better than having none at all. The MIDP 2.1 update to the Series 40 platform now enables extended usage of the dedicated media controls as supplementary controls in miscellaneous applications like Java applets and games.

The extra buttons aren’t the only thing that the company’s engineers can offer as a means to improve the ergonomics and usability. Easy player launching is another important feature of Nokia phones. Some models come with a special player launch button (N91, N72, N81, 5200) which is equally helpful for minimizing the player window, others use the play/pause button for the same cause (5300XM, 5310XM), and a minority use exotic means – for instance, the 3250 and 5700XM models launch the player on rotating the bottom block. Nokia 5610XM is unique in this sense, as described below.

Right below the screen you can see the brand new control element – a three-position slide button. Sliding it left or right launches or switches to the already launched mp3 player and radio respectively. This effectively brings in a one-touch activation for the music application regardless of the menu you’re currently in. On the other hand, the functionality of this button is rather limited in the other spheres. It would be wonderful if the slide button could also serve for rewinding the track back and forth in the player window or switching between frequencies in the radio mode. Unfortunately, this can’t be done with this handset – the button only does what it does, that is just activating either the player or the FM tuner. No customizable settings for this element are available, but we can guess this aspect will be improved to a full-blown functionality in later models from the experimental stage as seen in Nokia 5610XM.

On the both sides of the slide button sit two LED lights which blink at a fixed interval. This can be optionally turned off. The slide button also acts as a finger rest when opening the slider.

Design and Ergonomics

Nokia 5610 XpressMusic utilizes the slider form-factor, the dimensions are 98.5 x 48.5 x 17 mm. The body of the phone is made from black plastic, glossy from the front and matte texturized on the backside (while the casing of 6500 Classic was made from steel). The back panel feels much like SonyEricsson W850i – a similar dotted pattern can be observed, functioning in a similar manner to prevent scrathing. The aluminium pieces are integrated into the side edges of the casing – two thin metal strips painted red or black. Similar to 5310, to color variants of the casing are available: black and red or black and blue, both combinations express equal harmony and don’t look too flashy. The red variation also sports differently colored pieces along the sides of the screen while the more strict blue variant has none. The physical dimensons are quite comfortable – this model can neither be called slim nor bulky.

The build quality is on a very high level, the sliding mechanism is very smooth and precise, no play between the parts can be observed, just like with Nokia 6500 Slide. Most of the device’s surface has a wet asphalt texture – matte, hard and resistant to fingerprints and worn spots, which also makes a good practical use. The face panel of the handset looks quite appealing. The buttons look as if they were of the touch-type, since no physical borders between them can be observed and they look absolutely flat. However that’s not true, the buttons are quite traditional mechanical ones. All the keys have a good keystroke and respond to the touch quite accurately. The glossy plastic of the keypad is the only disappointing feature because it’s easily soiled. This problem is common for all glossy surfaces in general, especially plastic ones. The navigation button is marked with a play/pause symbol in the center, it’s quite comfortable to use. The numerical keypad looks quite traditional, the keys slightly stick out above the surface, they’re made of a black plastic just like with the 6500 Slide. The keypad backlighting is of a bright and even white color.

The top end of the casing hosts the 2.5 mm headset jack, the miniUSB and the charger slots. The small button found nearby is the battery cover holder. The right edge of the casing hosts the camera rocker and the volume controls. The left edge is free of any control elements, and the bottom edge has a hole for fastening the wristband. Supplying a music phone with a non-standard headset jack only seems a bit illogical, for instance Nokia 5310 comes with a standard 3.5 mm jack. The bundled adapters differ accordinlgy: the 5610 model comes with an AD-56 while 5310 has an AD-57. The headset is same for the two – it’s a HS-45.

The camera lens resides on the back panel, it’s almost the same with Nokia 6500 Slide save for cheaper optics – the actual difference in the image quality is present yet it’s not critical. There’s no lens guard, so the lens is prone to greasing. As a matter of fact, the camera is what makes Nokia 5610 truly unique among the rest of music phones available on the market today, even the top Nokia phones (N81) as well as phones by competitive brands (Samsung i450, SonyEricsson W910i) come with worse cameras (2 Mp without auto-focusing).

The screen of Nokia 5610 is also the same with Nokia 6500 slide, based off a 2.2 inch matrix with a color palette of 16M colors. The screen quality is quite high, even in the broad daylight the information on the screen remains perfectly legible. Along the sides of the screen the CIF camera lens and the luminance sensor are located (so the phone auto-adjusts the brightness level depending on strength of the ambient lighting. Unlike the latest Samsung handsets, there’s no way to turn the sensor off.

Battery

Below the battery bay lies the microSD memory card slot with full support for hot swapping, and the typical package includes a 1Gb memory card. As specified by the manufacturer, the maximum supported card capacity for this model is 4 Gb.

Nokia 5610 utilizes a BP-5M (Li-Ion, 900 mAh) battery. The same one is used in 6500 slide. As stated by the manufacturer, the maximum talk time for this one is 6 hours and the maximum standby time is 320 hours, this are almost the same results with 6500 slide (6 and 310 hours). In our tests the device endured about two days and a half of moderate duty (up to an hour of talk time, an hour and a half of photo shooting and menu oprations and 2-3 hours of listening to the player and the radio).

But when it comes to mp3 playback, the results become way more impressive. The thing is that 5610 (and 5310 alike) are the next-gen music phones which sport a number of energy-saving features never seen before. In other words, during the music playback the device does its best to waste as little charge as possible. The dedicated DSP (Digital Signal Processor) besides its main function (which consists in providing a better audio quality) also sports an extra chip serving to reduce the power consumption rates. Nokia 5610 can stay as long as 20 hours of continuous music playback cycle without recharging. (Nokia themselves claim 22 hours) which is more than just fine. This will surely satisfy the majority of consumers. Now Nokia music phones can challenge the same class of products by competitive brands while just a few months ago similar solutions by Nokia suffered from dramatically short battery lives.

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