Nokia 5310 Cell Phone Review
By Marianne Schultz
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
Published on September 30, 2008
The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is a compact, candy-bar format phone offered by T-Mobile. As you can tell by its name, it's intended to be a music-oriented phone and it has the external music control buttons and included accessories to live up to that name. And when we say compact, we mean tiny - the 5310 is a truly small phone that offers excellent portability, though its size may be a liability for those with larger hands given its correspondingly small buttons. It's available from T-Mobile for $49.99 with a 2-year contract when purchased online.
The 5310's operating system is responsive and user-customizable with wallpapers, themes, ringtones, and more. What it doesn't offer is the ability to add applications - you'll be limited to downloading games from T-Mobile's T-Zones store, and not much else. It's easy to navigate and use the major functions - the camera/video interface is straightforward and creating SMS/MMS messages are a piece of cake. We like that you can start creating a text message and then add media to turn it into an MMS if you change your mind. Email is another story, however - with no native email client on the phone itself, you'll have to do everything on the web, though T-Mobile does include a quick portal offering easy access to the most popular email services.
Dialing the 5310 goes pretty quickly if your fingers are small enough to avoid pressing multiple buttons at the same time. The buttons are quite plasticky and can be hard to tell apart by feel alone. The external music control buttons don't offer a lot of tactile feedback, but their location should make it easy to use them when the phone is in your pocket or back regardless.
The 5310 does include some basic organizer features, like a calendar, to-do and notes applications, and a contacts list, of course. The calendar, to-do, and notes functions will allow you to keep track of a light schedule, though it won't allow you to manage a busy calendar where you might want to include a lot of details for an upcoming calendar event or create groups to better organize your to-do's. It does not come with any software to sync your data with your computer.
Browsing the web is a little painful on the 5310 - with such a small screen, there's a lot of scrolling to be done to navigate the typical web page, but it does a better job rendering web pages than expected. Like most basic cell phones, the browser doesn't offer advanced features like tabbed browsing or a full history that is saved between browsing sessions. In contrast, the music software offers a much better experience, providing the flexibility to create and edit music and video playlists right on the phone, and you'll have almost instaneous access to get some music playing with the control buttons right on the front of the phone. Unfortunately, video playback itself is an entirely different story - the 5310 has very limited video file format compatibility, and viewing videos on the tiny screen isn't the best multimedia experience.
Most carriers are working on improving and speeding up their cellular networks every day, and offering more and more phones that can take advantage of these improvements. Regrettably, the 5310 is not one of these phones, able to connect only to T-Mobile's EDGE data network which can often be 2 to 3 times slower than high-speed 3G networks. Without WiFi, you'll have no faster alternative on the 5310. When it comes to Bluetooth, the 5310 is highly functional, affording a number of profiles including the coveted A2DP profile to let you use stereo Bluetooth headset to listen to music and the dial-up networking profile to use the 5310 as a wireless modem for your computer (though you'll have to pay T-Mobile extra for this).
Performance (read the full lab performance results at wirelessinfo.com)
Audio quality is an important aspect of a phone's performance, regardless of what other functions it offers. The 5310 performs just above average compared to all the phones we've tested in terms of the audio it sends and receives, so it should do just fine for most users for every day use. We also measure a phone's side tone, which is the amount of your own voice piped back to you so you can judge how loudly you're speaking. In this area, the 5310 does pipes back a little more of your own voice than the ideal level, so you may think you're speaking too loudly when you're really not, and compensate for this by speaking more quietly.
The 5310 has a 2.0-megapixel camera that sounds great on paper but isn't so good in actuality. Still image and video resolution are both poor and colors come out under-saturated. The amount of noise in still images is better than the average of all phones we've tested, but is still pretty dismal when compared to a dedicated digital camera, though this is to be expected of your typical cell phone camera.
The Nokia 5310 surpassed T-Mobile's claimed talk time battery life by a couple of hours for a total of 5 hours and 14 minutes. Battery life during music playback wasn't bad at 9 hours and 24 minutes. During web browsing, the battery lasted for a surprising 6 hours and nine minutes. For such a small phone with a correspondingly small battery, the Nokia does a good job of keeping you in business no matter what you're doing, performing better than the average of all the phones we've tested in every area.
Comparisons (read more in-depth comparisons at wirelessinfo.com)
At $49.99 when ordered online, and considering the 1GB SD card and headphones that come with it in addition to the AC charger and power cord that doubles as a USB cord, the Nokia 5310 is a pretty good value. Looking at other music-oriented phones, Verizon offers the LG Chocolate 3 with more internal storage, over-the-air music downloads through their VCAST service, and high-speed data capability on Verizon's EVDO network, but all of this comes at more than twice the price of the Nokia 5310, costing $129 when purchased online with a 2-year contract. T-Mobile's Samsung Beat is another alternative that's currently free, and it has a similar feature set to the Nokia 5310 though it does include GPS, which the Nokia does not have. A superlative multimedia phone would be the iPhone 3G, although the $199 or $299 price tag with a 2-year contract with AT&T throws it well beyond the Nokia 5310's playing field in terms of price.
With these kinds of alternatives available, the Nokia 5310 is a good bet for those looking for an inexpensive, ultra-compact phone that's easy to load up with your own music and get going with right out of the box. Over time, prices of existing cell phone models tend to drop, so the Nokia 5310 may some day be offered for free, but we definitely have no complaints about its current price given what it offers.For a more in-depth review, visit the Nokia 5310 Review at our partner WirelessInfo.com
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