Mobile Phones Blog

The Nokia 5800 - Totally Tube-ular

January 8th, 2009 by Thomas

Despite rumours that Nokia’s long awaited touchscreen would be out in time for Christmas, the Nokia 5800, more commonly known as the ‘Tube’, is due to go on sale at the end of this month.

Somewhat appropriately, the Tube will first go on sale in the Nokia stores in Regent Street in London and at the store at Heathrow’s dreaded Terminal 5, at 10am on Friday the 23rd of January.

SIM free, the 5800 Tube costs £249, and will be available from network and mobile retailers’ high street outfits from the 30th of January; O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile will carry the phone in their stores, as will Carphone Warehouse and Phones 4U.

The phone is available to pre-order now, but Nokia have said that any Tubes ordered before the release date will not arrive until early February.

Spec wise, the 5800 is something of a beast - it features a 3.2 Megapixel camera capable of capturing video at 30fps, a 3.2″ touchscreen, and the capacity to hold microSD memory cards of up to 16GB in size.

The phone boasts some 35 hours of audio playback time, and plays files in eAAC+ MP3, WMA and WAV files, and can play tracks either via stereo Bluetooth, wired headphones thanks to the 3.5mm jack, or out of the twin surround sound speakers.

Along with this you get 9 hours of talk time and standby time of up to 17 days - amazing considering all the features and high end connectivity hardware running that touchscreen hood.

You can connect to the net at high speeds thanks to the inclusion of HSDPA and Wi-Fi, and A-GPS is also incorporated for sat nav functionality and geo-tagging of pictures and videos.

The announcement comes days after Motorola announced that their Motosurf A3100 touchscreen smartphone, also known as the Attila, was to hit stores by the end of the quarter.

Since the iPhone was released in 2007 pretty much every major mobile manufacter out there has released, or is preparing to release a multimedia touchscreen tablet in some form or other. LG were arguably first out off the mark with their fashion conscious collaboration with Prada, the, erm, LG Prada.

Samsung quite literally followed suit with the Samsung Armani, and since then we’ve also seen the HTC Touch Diamond, Touch HD, and not forgetting the T-Mobile G1, the Renoir and the Omnia, from LG and Samsung respectively, and the Storm 9500 from BlackBerry and Vodafone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.