Some facts about the 5800
- It's going to launch some time between October and December of this year.
- The price of the SIM-free model will be about 280 Euros plus taxes, which is approximately half the price of the SIM-free iPhone.
- This is not Nokia's direct response to the iPhone, that should come later under the Nseries brand. The 5800 is aimed at the mid-range market rather than the high end.
- The 5800's operating system is Symbian 9.5, the interface/platform is S60 5th Edition. Current N-Gage-compatible phones use S60 3rd Edition. (There is no S60 4th Edition by the way, Nokia tries to avoid anything with "4" in it due to Asian superstitions surrounding the number).
- This isn't Nokia's first touchscreen phone, that was the 7710 way back in 2004. However, the 5800 is the first touchscreen phone to run the popular S60 platform.
- The touchscreen has a resolution of 360x640 pixels, with a physical size of 3.2 inches.
- The touch-based interface can be used with fingers or a stylus, and the screen vibrates slightly when you touch it (haptic feedback).
- The 5800 uses the S60 web browser, which is based on the open source WebKit rendering engine. This is the same engine used by the Safari browser in Apple's iPhone, but unlike the iPhone the S60 browser is also capable of displaying Flash-based websites.
- There's a built-in accelerometer for automatic screen rotation and also a "proximity sensor", which is apparently there to stop accidental screen presses.
- It has a 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss autofocus camera which can also shoot video at 640x480 with 30 frames per second.
- There's built-in sat nav which can use GPS satellites or A-GPS phone network fixes.
- It will be compatible with Nokia's "Comes With Music", which lets you download as much music as you want from most major labels for a year, and then keep the music forever even when the year is up. Comes With Music will probably cost around 100 euros, which initially will be added to the cost of a new phone (so if you buy a 250 euro phone with CWM it will cost 350 euros). CWM may later be available as a separate service that people can add to their existing phones.
- For those who want comparisons, the 5800 is physically narrower and thicker than the iPhone, making it much closer to the physical dimensions of a normal phone (which fits in with the 5800's much lower price level). You can see a photo comparison by clicking on the link below.
- You can see the official tech specs on the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic page on the Forum Nokia website.
What about the games?
- So far we don't know if S60 5th Edition is backwards compatible with S60 3rd Edition. This is very important to know, because if it is backwards compatible it should be able to run existing N-Gage games with minor modifications, as next gen N-Gage games are technically S60 3rd Edition applications.
- We have no idea if the 5800 will be N-Gage compatible either. However, it seems extremely likely that N-Gage will move onto S60 5th Edition in 2009 as the platform takes over from S60 3rd Edition. Sooner or later we will see an N-Gage-compatible device that uses S60 5th Edition, we just don't know when that will be. The 5800 therefore gives us a taste of where N-Gage is headed even if it isn't itself compatible (which we don't know of course).
- The 5800 comes with Bounce (no idea if this is the same as the N-Gage game) and the driving game Global Racer.
- Global Racer can be steered by simply tilting the phone, as the 5800 contains an accelerometer. This is something that many AAN readers have wanted to see on N-Gage.
Enough chat, what does it look like?
Here are some official press pictures:
