Nokia 5610 XpressMusic > Reviews > great music, great features, average build quailty

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel	Excellent
Durability & Robustness	Weak
Reception quality	Good
Battery standby time	Good
Value for money	Excellent
Range of features	Large selection

Advantages:	music, looks and easy of use
Disadvantages:	will it last 12 months?

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've had this phone for a month now so wanted to let others know what I think of it.
Now, your criteria may well be different from mine but the features I wanted from a new music phone were:
Good music features (obviously)
Easy to use
Good memory
Decent camera
Looks

While the 5610 ticks all of these boxes it has let me down in an area that I hadn't even considered before I started using it in every day life. First however I'll cover off the 5 criteria I had thought of:
Music features
As you would expect from a music phone the music features are spot on. The sound quality is excellent from the built in speaker, the headphones and via my bluetooth stereo headset. All the various music formats I have tried work just fine. The FM radio works well with good reception. My playlists and album art all transfered to the phone with no problems at all.

Easy of Use
I find using the phone very easy, if you're used to a Nokia you'll be familiar with the navigation straight away but if not it is still very intuitive so won't cause you any problems. A nice feature is music slider key that lets you quickly and easily switch between music, radio and phone. The navigation pad and keypad work well and feel nice to use. All the features you'd expect are available and easy to use, set your own ringtone music, send & record audio messages, email, play online games and surf super fast with 3G (the web browser is Opera).

Decent camera
The camera is 3.2megapixel and to be honest the photos look just as good as the ones I take on my 5MP N958GB. Good auto focus and video messaging looks as good as any phone I've used.

Good memory
Being used to 8GB with my old N95 I have been spoiled but this phone comes with 20MB built in and up to 4GB easily added with a microSD card. To get all the music i needed loaded I had to use the extra memory but this was easy to do.

Looks
I really like to looks of the phone, the screen is really really colorful and clear as well as being a good size 2.2inches (apparently). The slider looks and feels nice to use. While not very slim the phone fit nicely in a small pocket and is a joy to carry around in comparison to an N95.

So what let me down?
It was the build quality. The music slider key I found so nice and easy to use broke after a couple of weeks. While I got a free replacement from my network it doesn't bode well. Even the replacement seems to be a little shaky with a few rattles. A few buttons seem looser than I would like. I think after my 12 months contract is up I will be in need of the new model. Having said all that i've never kept a phone for more than 18 months, so will it really be a problem?