Say it Right - Nokia 5320 - Say & Play

Looks like Nokia can’t stop innovating new phones and it’s latest babies the Nokia 5320 and Nokia 5220 are no different. The Handsets only requires the sweet sound of your voice to select a track and begin playback. If you whisper ‘ice Ice baby’ the handset will blast the classic poetic lines of that hip hop legend Vanilla Ice. The dedicated audio chip also means that the sounds will not be the usualy tinny crap that that you hear from 17 year olds on the back of buses up and down the country playing the mobile mp3’s for everyone to hear.

The ’say & play’ feature will work for any of the tracks you loaded onto the Nokia 5320 / 5220 and with 8gb of space, that’s about 2000 tracks at your disposal. This is where it gets tricky, out of 100 tracks asked for, the handset will get it right about 80% of the time. The other 20% it will question your dialect and ask you to enounciate (cheeky b*stard).

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As part of the XpressMusic range it has dedicated music keys and a standard 3.5mm jack so you can actually attach your own decent set of headphones as opposed to the in the box set. The Nokia 5320’s other main focus is gaming. It is being touted as one of the main poster-girls of the new N-Gage platform that we’ve heard good things about. It is also the first non N-Series nokia to be deemed worthy enough to have both the N-Gage platform the Ovi system which is recommendation indeed. On the downside this extra N-Gage feature does not apply to the 5220 model and comes in at a £50 premium (difference in price between the 5320 and 5220) but if your a games fan it may be worth looking into.

The gaming aspect of the 5320 handest has dedicated controls and with Nokia’s new Mosh site allowing you to download free games the 5320 looks pretty tasty. Speaking of looks, we can’t make heads or tails of the design. Many reviews have been harping on about how innovative it is but in reality, it’s a pretty standard candy bar shape albiet the jet black finish with the colour highlighted rim does look pretty cool.
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The Nokia 5320 ranges from Free to about £170 at the Carphone Warehouse. The Nokia 5220 is from Free to aboyt £120.

Nokia N96 Review - More Candy Please

nokia-n96

After the runaway success of the N95 it was only logical for Nokia to step things up a gear. The upcoming Nokia N96 is the logical next step for the N series mobile phone. This 3g Smartphone packs all the features of its predecessor but with a bigger punch and without the glitches (the N95 OS was excruciatingly slow to load on occasion)

Looking at the pictures we can see that Nokia have decided to continue the sliding candy bar shape that it is becoming increasingly fond of and whilst no marvel of technological design, the N96 still looks like a pretty tasty cell phone. The 2.8 inch screen boasts sixteen million colours so watching movies and playing games on it will present no problem.

It’s Dual Slide like its n95 sister but with a much glossier look. It also bears a strong resemblance to the n81 so that gives an indication of where Nokia is heading in the design stakes.

The built in memory stands at 16gb which is significant for a smart phone and it also has the capability to take Micro SD cards for some added oomph.

One thing that has not been upgraded from the n95 (much to our surprise) is the quality of the camera. With so much of the N96′s energies going into being a camera and media savvy cell phone, it is surprising that it only packs a 5 mega pixel camera. This may sound like a lot and I know that some of you will be scratching your heads at the complaint but given the steps forward in all other aspect it seems a shame that this particular feature seems to have been left behind.

On the plus side for those who rely on their mobile phones for internet access when they are out and about is the built in RSS reader - great for blogs!. Not surprisingly the buzz around this phone is ridiculous and it will be another hot seller for Nokia this year. All in all, the Nokia N96 is a nice forerunner to the highly anticipated Nokia Tube….