After hearing so many rumors about the upcoming Nokia Tube handset, which at first seemed to be more like a dream concept, we finally have something official, directly from Nokia.
But what is actually hiding under this name that doesn’t suggest too much? –According to Nokia, it’s no other than the 5800 XpressMusic, a new model continuing the line of the most popular music phones brought on the market by the largest cell phone manufacturer.

The interesting part is that the cell phone brings with some high-end features and many describe it as the potential iPhone killer. Will it be the real iPhone killer after so many multimedia phones tried to take off the stage the world’s most wanted handset? Let’s find out the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic’s key weapons first and then comment on that.




The innovation consists of it being the first Nokia cell phone with touchscreen interface, so those of you who complained about Nokia N96 not providing this cool feature, you could leave it aside for a while and check this one, because included in the user interface is the Media Bar, a friendly drop down menu with direct access to all music and entertainment tools you can use on the go, such as songs, videos, pictures, web and online sharing. Thanks to the Flash content support, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic codenamed Tube enables web surfing in a new way, to create an experience similar with the one on personal computers.
Like all the cell phones optimized for music, Tube has a graphic equalizer, which allows you to save your preferred sound settings depending on the music genres you are playing, as well as a 3.5mm jack for headphones and powerful built-in surround sound stereo speakers.




All the media is gathered in the internal phone’s memory which can be extended up to 16GB to store 6,000 songs in almost all known audio formats. You can get these songs from the Nokia Music Store or transfer your playlist items onto the handset via USB.
Another feature from the new interface is the Contacts Bar, where you have the possibility to highlight your favorite contacts on the screen with a finger touch, and enable the history of recent text messages, emails, phone logs, photos and even blog updates.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Tube touchscreen phone sports a large 3.2-inch TFT display with high contrast and brightness, 16:9 aspect ratio and 16 million colors, as well as 30 fps high-speed video recording and playback. Inside there’s the built-in 3.2MP digital camera with Carl Zeiss lens, which allows you to shoot clear images while on the go, and send them instantly on the online communities like Share on Ovi, Flickr, or Facebook.




To access the menus you have a virtual QWERTY keyboard and a stylus pen. In addition, the 3G HSDPA cell phone measuring 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm at 109 grams has the handwriting recognition technology, proximity sensor for auto turn-off, accelerometer sensor for the landscape view when you turn the phone sideways, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g wireless connectivity, the UPnP technology, 3.6 Mbps download speed, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, the Symbian operating system with S60 software, email, Instant Messaging, HTML, RSS reader, a secondary videocall camera, A-GPS, Nokia Maps Touch, Stereo FM radio with RDS, TV out, voice commands, document viewer, and no less than 8 hours and 45 minutes of continuous talk time, with 406 hours of standby.

With 60 languages support covering 90% of the world’s population, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Tube touchscreen phone brings all the high-end features of a modern handset to everyone’s hands. It will be available in stores by the end of 2008 in Black, Red or Blue.

Nokia announced a price of 279 EUR which seemed a mistake at first, knowing that Nokia N96, which is non-touch but has the same advanced features, came out recently at 550 British Pounds. We've heard Jo Harlow, responsible with the Nokia Music Device Portfolio, talking about Nokia 5800 XpressMusic being “the best touch value proposition on the market” so we finally believed the price. There will be also another version with the newly released Nokia music service called Comes With Music, which will be out at the beginning of 2009.




Nokia explains the essential:
"As Nokia's first mass-market device with a touch screen, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic turns a 'user interface' into a 'human interface' by truly putting people first. For example, we've introduced the Nokia Contacts Bar, which is like a digital RSS feed on your life," said Harlow. "By adding the benefits of touch screen technology to S60, the world's leading smartphone interface, Nokia is taking the familiar and giving it a human touch. We have used touch technology where it really adds value such as the Contacts Bar, Media Bar and clever shortcuts from the homescreen to menu items such as calendar, profiles and clock. "