The (Xpress)Music in Nokia 5320

 (I know it's later than a day, but it was unavoidable).

The Nokia 5320 is an XpressMusic (XM, from here onwards) phone, and it does boast a pretty nifty musical experience. For starters, here's what I noted.

When you hook up the phone to the PC, you have the option to either go into the PC Suite mode, or a hard disk mode. There are two others, but not related with music. The hard disk mode will work everywhere (and when you are in the hard disk mode, the phone doesn't go offline, as was the case with some N-series phones).

After putting in your music, when you launch the music player, it sometimes detected new music and asked you to refresh - sometimes it doesn't, and you have to manually refresh. This takes around a minute or so if you've used alot of the space on your memory card (I have a 1GB card that came with the package).

After scanning, you can create playlists or listen artist-wise or all songs, or listen to the podcasts (separate service). The music plays fine, without glitches, although the response isn't instant when you forward/rewind (it takes up to half a second to act upon... maybe because it's symbian). If you forward a track, it takes almost a second to start playing the next track, but if you leave the player alone, it takes a split of a second to switch to another track.

The main screen has album art view in it, and you can set your own equalizer settings, amongst from a few other choices. On the track listing view, you can scroll either in normal speed, or a faster speed (press the button again, and it scrolls quickly). Or if you want, search by typing the name of the song!

The N-gage button, if pressed and held, is a "Say and Play" feature. You say the name of the artist, the song title, album or playlist, and it'll play the first track in the pop up list that follows. The speech settings may need to be tweaked in the phone settings before you can get good matches. Since I listen to English music only, I didn't have a problem with many tracks, though some were not recognized.

When forwarding, rewinding or playing/pausing while not in the music player nor on the desktop/standby screen, a small pop up appears telling you what it's doing. A helpful feature if you want to know what the title of the current song is, but it doesn't appear when the songs are in their normal playback.

The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack - you could use either those pair of earphones that came with the phone, or use your own. I don't like the set that came with the phone because they don't fit in my ears (!), although if you can get them to fit in your ears, the sound quality is quite good indeed.

Nokia says they added a separate audio chip in the phone, and that audio chips certainly shows good results. The loudspeaker doesn't work well with loud volume, as I noted there's a bit of hiss. Lowering the volume a bit solves the problem.

I'd say this is probably better than the walkman phones in the sense that there's a standard headphone jack in the phone (and not as an adapter), and if you use any other pair of earphones, the phone's microphone can be used to answer and make calls - something that many new phones lack capability of. I'd give this a 9/10 for the music, and not full because there are a few (minor) glitches (such as the slow response while changing tracks manually)