Review: Nokia's Slim 5310 Music Phone

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Music Player

Music Player

Music Player

Multimedia / Applications

The 2-megapixel camera on the 5310 churns out average quality photos, which is quite disappointing. Photo-taking is done in portrait mode, as the centre D-pad key is the shutter key. Unfortunately, the 5310 does not have a dedicated shutter/camera key like a lot of phones tend to have these days. There are, however, settings enabling users to take photos in various color modes – black and white, sepia and negative. The white balance was not exactly great during my tests, giving a bluish hue to all the photos taken. The end result is always good enough for candid shots, but never good enough for prints, which isn't surprising for a fixed focus camera like the 5310's. The 2-megapixel camera can also be used to record video clips in two resolutions - 176 x 144 pixels or 128 x 96 pixels. The length of these videos is limited only by the amount of memory that is available. The biggest flaw of the 5310's camera is its speed. Shutter lag is about 1 second, and it takes about 5-10 seconds to snap and save a photo, which is a painfully long time.

The music application is pretty impressive on the 5310. It's similar to previous S40 music applications, but offers a layout quite like the iconic iPod. Music files can be divided into various categories, such as - artists, song names, playlists, genres and even composers. Adding music files is easy and can be done in two different ways – via PC Suite directly onto the phone, or by using a card reader to simply drag and drop files onto your memory card. However, the latter option requires removing the memory card from the phone. The 5310 can also sync with Windows Media Player 10 and above, enabling users to add album art onto their phones.

The music player can be customized with four different themes. Apart from changing its appearance, there's nothing much that the themes offer, but I guess users who love to personalize their phones will enjoy this feature. The on-board equalizer didn't offer much, so I left it switched off during the entire test period. With the included earphones, music sounded hollow and the bass was almost non-existent. However, with the included 3.5mm jack, I could swap earphones easily. I tested the 5310 with both my Sennheiser PX100 and Crossroad MylarOne X3i, and the results were pretty impressive. The sound was crisp and bass was more than adequate. Overall, sound quality was actually comparable to my iPod. The dedicated on-board audio chip has surely played a large role in providing this high quality sound from the phone.

As mentioned earlier, music is controlled via the 3 buttons beside the 5310's display. I would have also preferred a dedicated key-lock switch on the phone, as I found it cumbersome to have to deactivate the key-lock via the centre D-pad key and * key before I was able to access the music control keys. When the music player is minimized and playing in the background, the active standby menu will display the name of the song being played. Music stops automatically when a call comes in, but it does not resume automatically when you end the call, which was quite puzzling. This meant that I had to manually restart my music every time I received a call.

When you get tired of your music library, you can always switch to the built-in FM radio, and the 5310 worked well in this department. Thankfully, the phone comes with a flight mode option that allows users to access all of its multimedia features in areas where radio frequency emitting devices are prohibited. The 5310 supports microSD cards up to 2GB in size, which should be good for about 500 songs or so depending on the size of each file.

Apart from multimedia applications, the 5310 also offers basic PIM applications. The calendar is a useful feature, enabling you to enter your appointments and set reminders for each of them. The active standby display on the home screen works like the "Today" screen on a Windows Mobile device, letting you know of pending appointments. Users can also set the appointments to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. These calendar entries can be synced with your desktop via PC Suite, enabling users to sync their Outlook appointments with the 5310. Apart from the Calendar, there is also a To-Do list, calculator, stop watch and a voice recorder as well.

Web browsing is done via the xHTML browser. This handles light websites well, but when it comes to frames and heavily graphical sites, the phone struggles to display them properly. Our 5310 came pre-installed with Snake 3, an updated version of the original Snake game. Apart from Snake, there is also a Sim City-like game called "City Bloxx". There is a music guessing game as well, that plays a short clip from any music file from your library and requires you to select the right song name from a list. This is an interesting game to include, but for users with a lot of music on their phone, could prove to be quite good fun. However, users can always download newer games and more applications online.