Nokia 5310 XpressMusic

“Summarizing our impressions of the Nokia 5310 we have to admit the phone is quite a pleasure to use. Plus, the good looks are a most welcome perk. Simplicity, affordability and friendly handling are good enough grounds for the mass appeal of Nokia 5310.However there is enough competition in the thin music phone niche. As we see it, the strongest competitor will be the look-alike Sony Ericsson W880, and there is Sony Ericsson W890 just around the corner. And there's always Samsung and its latest Ultra lineup which has a nice music player and traditionally fare great in our music quality tests.Other than that all we can say that the Nokia 5310 is well worth it and if you are not in a great need of a better camera it sounds like a great deal.”

“A far cry from Nokia's clunky 5300 slider from just two years ago, this truly bite-size candy bar is 9 grams lighter than the W890i, about 0.25mm thinner and less wide by about 6.6mm (it's also advertised as .01 inches slimmer, but we couldn't tell). While we had no trouble stashing the 5310 in our skinny pantaloons, USB file transfers required reconfiguring the settings before we were able to drag and drop tunes. Like the W890i, removing the battery cover revealed a MicroSD slot that can handle up to 4GB. Unlike the W890i, the 5310 comes with a glorious 3.5mm jack. Overall, if you want a music-driven phone — and don't care about expedient web browsing or quality snapshots, you're not likely to find a better handset for this kind of money.WIRED Excellent sound quality. Able to accept calls not only while USB-connected, but also *during* file transfers. Convenient external music controls. 3.5mm jack (can't stress this enough). Tween alert: sufficiently loud external speaker great (annoying) for public places.TIRED Flashless 2.0 MP camera. Dated, sluggish OS. Only 1GB card included. Dinky earbuds are literally a foot shorter than iPod buds. Only 17-second vid clips. Voice recordings limited to 58 seconds. Ours came stocked with a Panic at the Disco track (promptly deleted, thank you very much).”

“The 5310 is an attractive, ultra-slim phone from Nokia. Although not particularly basic, neither is it hugely feature-rich when compared to other phones on the market. Instead, it excels at the task it was designed for - being a very pocketable phone that plays music well. The slim form factor certainly caught the attention of my friends, and I enjoyed using it for the entire two weeks that I tested it. The camera could have been better, but those who are looking for a superior camera need look no further than the 5310's elder brother, the 5610 - which is in a sliding form factor. The memory card slot offers expandability and the versatility of being able to switch between different music libraries stored upon different microSD cards. The best feature of the 5310, which isn't found on the 5610, is the 3.5mm audio jack. To me, that alone makes the 5310 a winner. With good audio quality and battery life, it's really quite difficult to fault the 5310 and we highly recommended it if you're looking for a mid-ranged music phone which comes in such a slim candybar form factor. However, Sony Ericsson's W580i might be a good alternative as well, if you don't mind slider phones and fancy a nifty motion sensing interface to change tracks.”