Nokia's XpressMusic series has been quiet silent against the rapid releases of Walkman series phones from Sony Ericsson. The 5220 is an affordable handset that competes in the music phone segment.

Looks and Design
The 5220 XpressMusic has a funky asymmerical design, which looks a bit weird at first, but does make the phone look pretty cool. The black body has sharp contrasting colors at the sides, which are avaiable in Red, Blue and Green. The front portion is very glossy and balck, and the keys are well placed and usable. The D-pad too works without any hassels, although the placement of the dedicated music and volume keys will take some time getting used to.

Battery:
The phone has a powerful battery that can go all day long with lots of usage (According to Nokia it has over 5 hours talktime or almost 24 hours music playback in one complete charge)

Memory:
The phone has 30 MB onboard memory and is supposed to come with a 512 MB microSD, but I recieved a 1 GB microSD. The phone can support memory cards upto 8 GB

Display:
A 240x320 resolution on its 2" TFT sceen makes a wonderful display and the S40 graphics look quiet nice too. The phones supports themes, and you also get to choose from the active standby screen or the plain clean one.

Camera:
The camera is probably the weakest aspect of the 5220 XpressMusic as it comes without Flash lights or even Autofocus. But the pictures it takes is reasonably good for a 2.0 Mega pixel camera.

Music:
Being a XpressMusic phone, the media player is simply wonderful The dedicated keys flash rythmatically while the music is playing making the phone look quiet catchy. The loud speaker is nice and loud, although like almost all other phones, the bass is quiet low and the sounds start to loose its clarity when you start reaching the maximum voulmes. The quality of the bundled handsfree is average - but you can give the music exprerience a big boost by using handsfree sets like the HPM-70 or HPM-75 from Sony Ericsson.

Applications / Games:
The phone being a Symbian S40 devices does not support S60 applications, but instead it has support for MIDP 2.1 (Java) - and it works really well. 3D graphics is supported by the phone and the overall performance of the JVM is good too. The phone comes with some applications (WidSets, Opera Mini, Flickr, Yahoo! Go, etc) and some 3D games pre-loaded.

Connectivity:
The phone supports Bluetooth v2 with A2DP, GPRS, HSCSD, EDGE and microUSB. There are three separate connectors - one each for the Charger, USB and Handfree. The connectors and sockets are neatly hidden by 'lid's on the sides.


All said and done, the Nokai 5220 XpressMusic is a great phone at a low price. If the camera isn't the most important function to you, then this phone shoud certainly be on your list to consider.


. .. .