Nokia 5630 XpressMusic Review - Display, OS and Multimedia

The display is a 2.2 inch QVGA display with a native resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. It supports 16M colors, just like all other Nokia Symbian phones. The display has very nice brightness and contrast levels. The display quality is superb and sunlight legibility is also pretty nice. Except for the small display size, the display is almost perfect for watching videos.

The keypad is located just below the display. The keys have a nice feel and the keypad is quite ergonomic. The number keys are quite big and easy to operate. The D Pad is very usable and smooth. Besides the D Pad are the 6 standard keys – left and right soft keys, Menu and Clear keys and the Call and End buttons. The display has decent backlighting which makes it usable even in the dark.

The Nokia 5630 XpressMusic is powered by the Symbian OS v9.3 with Feature Pack 2. This is the latest version of the Symbian OS, it is similar to the previous versions but is much faster and snappier. Feature Pack 2 brings many visual and performance improvements to OS v9.3. The UI is the typical Symbian interface with an enhanced Active Standby screen and interface improvements. The 5630 XpressMusic has a 600 Mhz ARM 11 processor and 128 MB of RAM, enough to multitask about 6-7 applications easily. The fast processor also leads to lower response times when navigating across menus and applications.

Most of the OS features like Contacts, Messaging, Call Log, Email etc are almost the same as the previous version with some improvements. It also comes with Quick Office which allows you to access your Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents on the go. A nice addition is Ovi Contacts which can be used to chat with your friends registered with Ovi or GTalk. You can also set status messages, share your GPS location and track details which makes it a fully featured chat client tightly integrated with your contacts.

The 5630 XpressMusic is a music centric smartphone with very nice audio capabilities, which is evident from its XpressMusic branding. It supports a lot of audio formats - MP3, AAC, eAAC+, WMA, M4A, WAV, RA etc. The Music Player has a nice interface which can be minimized without interrupting the music playback; you can view the currently playing track on the standby screen. The Music Player offers all the features you would expect from any standard one – an equalizer with 5 presets, sorting tracks by artist, album, genre etc, and searching tracks. You can copy songs to your device by Bluetooth, USB or by simply downloading the tracks. It also sports a new innovative feature called Say and Play, which allows you to play a track by just saying its name.

The overall audio quality of the 5630 XpressMusic is commendable. It has a superb dynamic range and frequency response with low noise levels. The bundled stereo headphones are good enough for casual listening.

It comes bundled with Real Player which supports a lot of formats like RV, MP4, 3GP etc. It allows video playback in both the normal as well as the full screen mode. However, the small display size doesn’t allow for an enjoyable video watching experience. To support more video formats, I would recommend installing Core Player.