Nokia 5800 full review -4

Touch

The most visible addition to S60 5th Edition is touch, and it clearly has a huge impact in the way you interact with the device. It enables both finger touch and stylus touch and supports several device configurations: those with D-pads and keypads, those which are purely touch driven (e.g. the 5800) and those which mix elements of both.

The Nokia 5800 can either be used two handed (stylus or finger touch) or one handed (with finger touch). In pure speed terms, two handed use will generally be quicker and a stylus is more accurate than a finger, but this is set against the convenience of one handed usage (finger). Having this flexibility is a real boon. After all, many short phone interactions (making a call, writing and sending a text message) are done while on the move or in parallel with another activity generally one-handed). Equally, there are times when you'll be able to use two hands and certain activities, mainly centred around multimedia creation and consumption, definitely benefit from this mode of usage.

It is important to realise that S60 5th Edition really is the enabling of touch interaction for the existing S60 UI. If you look at screenshots side by side you see obvious commonalities; those that have used S60 devices before will find a marked feeling of familiarity as they use the new platform.

For longer lists, scrolling can be cumbersome and, as with earlier versions of S60, such lists (e.g. contacts list) have an adaptive search box towards the bottom of screen. When you start inputting text, the list shrinks to show only those items that match the search term. When you touch the search box an on screen a-z keyboard is shown, but this keyboard is also adaptive, so as you enter a letter, the number of letters on screen is reduced to only show those that will result in a match. Given that such searches usually only need 2 or 3 letters, it is far more convenient than bringing up one of the text entry methods and means that, even for long lists, most entries are just a few taps away.