Review: Nokia 5500 Sport

**Anilrgowda** · 05-Jan-2007, 01:24 AM

Phone rating:

The Nokia 5500 Sport is a gadget-laden smartphone designed for outdoor and sports use. This is an unusual concept, but Nokia have successfully pulled it off.
The 5500 Sport is designed to be tough and hardwearing. It has a stainless steel body for enhanced durability and resistance to shock, water, and dust. We don't recommend taking it for a swim, but it should be a lot more hardwearing than a typical mobile! The only issue to point out is that users report that the writing tends to wear off the keys, and sometimes the whole keypad breaks off after several months of use. This appears to be quite common and is clearly a design defect.
The phone has three separate modes - Phone, Music, or Sports - with a special swap key to switch between modes. In Sports mode, the phone monitors your exercise and displays training data, speed and distance, steps taken, and calories burned. In Music mode, you can listen to MP3 tracks or the FM radio. Sound quality is excellent, and a Nokia Sports Headset is included. The radio has Visual Radio support, enabling you to find out which song is playing, who sings it, and other artist information. There's plenty of memory for storing MP3 tracks on the expandable microSD memory card. The standard 5500 Sport comes with a 64 MB microSD card, whilst the Nokia 5500 Sport Music edition comes with a 512MB card.
The phone has a really cool feature that works well: a 3D sensor that responds to taps. In Music mode, you can tap the phone to control MP3 playback. In Sports mode, tapping the phone gives you voice feedback on sports tracking data. In Phone mode, a tap will read out SMS messages, so you can listen to your texts while you exercise.
A Nokia Carrying Holder and Clip are included in the sales package. In addition the 5500 Sport Music edition includes a Nokia Sports Belt, Nokia Wrist Strap and a Nokia Mountain Bracket.
We weren't expecting to like the 5500 Sport. Nokia's range of 5-series Sport phones have always seemed to us to be contrived products of Nokia's marketing department, rather than something that users would actually want. When we heard that the latest 5-series was a smartphone we had a bit of a laugh. Smartphones are heavy and unreliable, right? Useless for outdoors! But we're happy to admit that we were wrong. By adopting a Symbian platform for the 5500, Nokia have been able to pack in a whole load of features that really are useful. And it's the lightest, most compact Symbian phone around! It's a hardwearing phone with tons of useful gadgets for outdoor/sports use, and it doesn't have any of the faults of previous 5-series phones. However, as noted above there is a defect in the keypad design and the keypad is not durable - a bit of a problem for a phone that's specifically designed to be hardwearing.

05-Jan-2007, 01:24 AM	#1 (permalink)
Anilrgowda Administrator Posts: 18,715 Join Date: Jan 2006 Rep Power: 10 IM:	Review: Nokia 5500 Sport Phone rating: The Nokia 5500 Sport is a gadget-laden smartphone designed for outdoor and sports use. This is an unusual concept, but Nokia have successfully pulled it off. The 5500 Sport is designed to be tough and hardwearing. It has a stainless steel body for enhanced durability and resistance to shock, water, and dust. We don't recommend taking it for a swim, but it should be a lot more hardwearing than a typical mobile! The only issue to point out is that users report that the writing tends to wear off the keys, and sometimes the whole keypad breaks off after several months of use. This appears to be quite common and is clearly a design defect. The phone has three separate modes - Phone, Music, or Sports - with a special swap key to switch between modes. In Sports mode, the phone monitors your exercise and displays training data, speed and distance, steps taken, and calories burned. In Music mode, you can listen to MP3 tracks or the FM radio. Sound quality is excellent, and a Nokia Sports Headset is included. The radio has Visual Radio support, enabling you to find out which song is playing, who sings it, and other artist information. There's plenty of memory for storing MP3 tracks on the expandable microSD memory card. The standard 5500 Sport comes with a 64 MB microSD card, whilst the Nokia 5500 Sport Music edition comes with a 512MB card. The phone has a really cool feature that works well: a 3D sensor that responds to taps. In Music mode, you can tap the phone to control MP3 playback. In Sports mode, tapping the phone gives you voice feedback on sports tracking data. In Phone mode, a tap will read out SMS messages, so you can listen to your texts while you exercise. A Nokia Carrying Holder and Clip are included in the sales package. In addition the 5500 Sport Music edition includes a Nokia Sports Belt, Nokia Wrist Strap and a Nokia Mountain Bracket. We weren't expecting to like the 5500 Sport. Nokia's range of 5-series Sport phones have always seemed to us to be contrived products of Nokia's marketing department, rather than something that users would actually want. When we heard that the latest 5-series was a smartphone we had a bit of a laugh. Smartphones are heavy and unreliable, right? Useless for outdoors! But we're happy to admit that we were wrong. By adopting a Symbian platform for the 5500, Nokia have been able to pack in a whole load of features that really are useful. And it's the lightest, most compact Symbian phone around! It's a hardwearing phone with tons of useful gadgets for outdoor/sports use, and it doesn't have any of the faults of previous 5-series phones. However, as noted above there is a defect in the keypad design and the keypad is not durable - a bit of a problem for a phone that's specifically designed to be hardwearing.

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