The Nokia 5300 XpressMusic Cell Phone

The Nokia 5300 XpressMusic cell phone is one of the latest cell phones to hit the U.S. market. It has been available in Europe for quite some time, but just recently became available in the U.S.

We went to the T-Mobile store to purchase a new phone for my husband, and we ended up buying two- one for me and one for him. Once I saw how cool the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic was, I had to have one for myself too. We now have "his" and "hers" cell phones. His XpressMusic is black; mine is purple.

The Nokia XpressMusic is a slide phone, which I enjoy because it locks the keys, but is not a flip phone (which I tend to find annoying). The main novelty of the 5300 XpressMusic is that it has an MP3 player. It cannot play iTunes, but can play WMA files and MP3 files. Downloading the files from computer to phone is relatively easy. One of my favorite features has been the ability to use these MP3 files as ringers. I always loved having my favorite songs as ringers, but the ringer downloads on my old phone were expensive, and sometimes they didn't even sound that much like the real song. With the XpressMusic, the phone plays my favorite MP3s when someone calls, and it sounds like a little radio in my purse. Right now, I have it set to play, "All You Need Is Love," by The Beatles.

The MP3s can be played through the regular phone speaker (like when your rings), through a Bluetooth, or through headphones. One frustration I have is that you cannot fit regular headphones into the phone, and the headphones they give you are annoying. Perhaps this is the cool, new thing in headphones, but the left side is ridiculously shorter than the left. Like seriously, one foot shorter. The left headphone cord is only like 8 inches. I imagine I could probably buy iPod headphones that would fit, but I haven't tried yet.

The phone features a radio, and comes with the radio attachment. The reception is not great, but is helpful for things like tuning into the TVs at the gym. The only problem is that the headphones don't seem to fit perfectly into the radio attachment.

There are also some other great features to the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic, including a camera and video camera. It takes short videos, which even include sound. The quality is not the best, but not bad for a cell phone. The photo quality is alright if you are up close, but it is significantly better than some other camera phones I have seen. I also like the fact that it has special buttons on the side for using the camera, which also makes it feel more like using a regular digital camera. When you take a picture of someone, you can set the photo to flash when the person is calling. You can also set it so that a video of that person plays when they call, although that is not something I have really played with much yet.

The menu is very user friendly, which is a big plus if you are like me and don't want to spend hours figuring out how to use your cell phone. There are also some other neat quirks, like the fact that the white part of the outside of the phone glows in the dark. That's not even mentioned anywhere on the packaging, but it is something I discovered a few days ago.

One of the best features of this phone is the fact that it is fairly inexpensive for everything that it includes. Prices will be different with each carrier, but T-Mobile is currently offering the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic for $99 with 2-year contract.