Nokia 5630 XpressMusic

Available now
10th February 2009

A step up from last year's Nokia 5320, the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic is a midrange 3.5G music phone with WiFi, a 3.2 megapixel camera and support for N-Gage gaming.

This is a Symbian S60 smartphone, which means that the 5630 XpressMusic has a fair degree of flexibility when it comes to software. There are lots of tools for sharing files, accessing mail and the latest version of S60 allows for a personalised homescreen and various other customisations. As we mentioned before, the 5630 XpressMusic also supports N-Gage gaming, and it comes with a range of pre-installed "Try & Buy" games.

Supported media formats including MP3, WMA and various AAC files, plus MPEG4, 3GP, H.263, H.264 and RealVideo video clips. The 5630 XpressMusic has a 3.5mm socket, allowing a standard headset to be used with the phone. The 5630 also has an FM radio and support for stereo Bluetooth. There will also be a "Comes with Music" version of the 5630, allowing for unlimited music downloads. The 5630 also sports dedicated media playback keys to the left of the screen.

The camera is a fairly standard 3.2 megapixel unit with a dual LED flash. Nokia say that the camera is "Full Focus", which we take as meaning "fixed focus". Video capture resolution is a reasonable 640 x 480 pixels at 15 frames per second, although high-end Nokia phones have double the capture rate.

The display is a standard 2.2" 240 x 320 pixel panel in 16 million colours. We think that this is likely to be a bit small for gaming, but reasonably OK for most other uses.

Underneath, this is a quad-band GSM phone with 900 / 2100 MHz WCDMA. The 5630 supports HSDPA high-speed downloads (up to 10.2 Mbps), HSUPA uploads (up to 2.0 Mbps) and of course standard UMTS, plus GPRS and EDGE data. Unusually for a phone in this price range, WLAN support is also included.

It's a very lightweight phone for its class, coming in at just 83 grams. The smallish screen size accounts for part of this, and also we guess the 860 mAh battery which we think might be a bit underpowered. Nokia claim that the 5630 is good for 4 hours talktime on 3G, with up to 16 days standby time.

The standard sales package includes a 4GB microSD card, a stereo wired headset, connectivity cable and a carrying pouch. One of the few major features that is missing is GPS.. but if you want that, then you should really expect to pay more than the €199 that the 5630 will cost before tax and subsidy.

It's not a particularly exciting device to look at, sharing a similar design to other XpressMusic series phones. We quite like the design of the keypad though, and overall this is a very smart looking handset with a touch of Finnish understatement. The pattern on the back is quite striking too.

Nokia say that the 5630 XpressMusic should be available from Q2 2009 in "select markets".