Nokia 5500 Sport

Discontinued
10th May 2006

The Nokia 5500 Sport is the latest in Nokia's 5000-series of ruggedised phones, designed to withstand knocks and splashes, and in a way it carries on from the Nokia 5140i, 5140, 5100 and other devices. But it's not just an existing handset in a rubbery case, the Nokia 5500 Sport has a few interesting technological features that make it stand out.

Get past the strange looks, and at first glance the Nokia 5500 Sport looks pretty conventional. It weighs a shade over 100 grams, has a 208x208 pixel display in 262,000 colours, a 2 megapixel digital camera, multimedia player, Bluetooth and expandable memory using microSD cards. In fact, at first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a tweaked Nokia 6230i - but one of the surprising things about the Nokia 5500 Sport is that it's a Symbian S60 Smartphone, rather than the normal Series 40 device you'd expect to see in a handset of this type.

It's the first S60 device we've seen with a 208x208 pixel panel, and at 103 grams we're pretty sure that it's Nokia's lightest S60 device to date. The 208x208 pixel panels to date have been pretty small, but it does appear that the 5500 Sport has a physically larger panel than the 6230i. It's also one of only a few Nokias that break the 2 megapixel camera barrier.

The reason for the inclusion of the S60 operating system becomes clear when you look at the software - the Nokia 5500 has three different operating modes, "Phone", "Sport" and "Music" which are accessible through an "instant swap" key. In sport mode, the Nokia 5500 has an exercise monitor, pedometer and calorie counter. In music mode, it can play back MP3, AAC, WMA and RealAudio tracks (plus others).. and of course you can even use it as a phone. On top of this, the Nokia 5500 Sport has a web browser, email client and the usual range of PIM functions, plus a text-to-speech application, RSS news reader, Push-To-Talk (PTT / PoC) and a whole host of other quite useful features.

And on top of that, there's a FM radio, flashlight and 3D sensor that includes a simple "screen tap" function for ease of use while in sport mode. Physically, the 5500 Sport is a tri-band 900/1800/1900 handset with GPRS and EDGE data, measuring 107x34x16mm. Talktime is 2-4 hours with up to 11 days standby time. All of this is wrapped in a stainless steel chassis with a spash and dust resistant case with rubber grips.

Perhaps we sound a bit breathless and excited about the Nokia 5500 Sport, but to be honest we at Mobile Gazette are not a sporting bunch.. it just seems that the Nokia 5500 Sport is actually a great phone. If you ignore all the sporting pretensions, the Nokia 5500 is a well specified and practical phone with lots of useful features. It can also withstand the odd knock and occasional rain shower. It's a great all round phone, and the only major flaw that we can see is that the battery life could be better.

Nokia say that the 5500 Sport should be available from Q3 2006 in a sober "Black" version or more funky "Grey" version (with brightly coloured stripes!). The Nokia 5500 Sport should cost around 300 Euro before tax and subsidy.

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