Nokia owns the bragging rights to being the number one mobile phone creator in the world. I’m sure many would agree. Nokia has acquired so many stars and medals on its uniform, we lost count already. In many countries, Nokia models have become the most popular as well as crowd favorites, for the young and old alike. It’s no surprise that Nokia will come up with another crowd pleaser in the fourth quadrant of 2006. Meet the Nokia Xpress Music 5300, it’s nothing short of exceptional.

Let’s talk design, shall we? The Nokia 5300 is a slide phone that comes in red and white, with the red band on the midsection rubberized for a soft feel. Other color schemes are black and white, and also lilac. The left spine of the unit houses the media controls, on the right is the volume adjustment and camera button, while on the back of the phone is the 1.3 mega pixel digital camera. The phone slides up to reveal a silver numeric keypad with raised buttons and a five-way toggle button. The QVGA screen measures 2 inches and displays 262,000 colors.

The Nokia 5300 has all the necessary features and applications that busy individuals need to get through their day. The unit has a 1000-contact capacity phonebook. Each contact can have multiple entries: phone numbers, email address, web page URL, PTT number, home address, birthday, nickname, and notes. The 5300 is capable of SMS, MMS, instant messaging, and email. There is also a voice recorder, to-do list, calendar, notepad, countdown timer, and stopwatch.

As a multimedia phone, the Xpress Music takes decent photos with its digital camera with 8x zoom. Photos are saved in JPEG format and can be in six resolutions. There is also a self timer, color effects, and multi-shot feature. Videos are also captured in great quality, and saved as 3GPP format. They can be as short as 6 seconds, or longer depending on available memory. Photos and videos can be shared via Bluetooth or transferred to a PC with the USB cable or memory card.

Of course, your best bet with the Nokia 5300 is its musicality. It supports songs in mp3, WMA, and AAC formats, among others. Music playback is sharp and clear. Bluetooth or stereo headsets are supported, and controlling the music is easy with the multimedia controls or the toggle button. Transferring songs from PC to phone is fast with the help of PC Suite and the USB cable. You can organize your songs by genre, artist, and album, as all the info is displayed onscreen. You can also play your songs in shuffle or random mode.

The Lithium Ion battery can withstand continuous music playback for 9 hours and 15 minutes.
However, the Nokia 5300 could use a little upping with the internal memory, which is only 5MB. Songs will most likely end up in the microSD card, which can carry up to 2GB. The Xpress Music box contains the battery, wall charger, USB cable, handsfree set, user manual, and CD-ROM software. The unlocked version of this phone has a suggested retail price of $199.99.