Features

Running on Nokia's Series 60 OS, the Nokia 5700 offers a wide variety of features and applications, but we'll start with the basics first. The 5700's phone book is limited only by the available memory. Each entry holds a wide range of fields, including as many as 15 types of phone numbers including a push-to-talk number; several e-mail and Web addresses; a job title, a work department and a company name; work and home street addresses; a birth date and anniversary; a nickname and a formal name; names for an assistant, a spouse, and children; and notes (the SIM card holds an additional 250 entries). You can organize callers into groups or pair them with a photo for caller ID purposes. The polyphonic ringtone selection wasn't huge--just 18 64-chord tones--but you can use MP3 files to identify callers. What's more, the 5700 offers video ringtones and a selection of ringtone effects.

Other standard offerings include a vibrate mode, text and multimedia messaging, a voice recorder, an alarm clock, a calendar, a unit and currency converter, a notepad, and a calculator. The 5300 offered a few additional options such as a countdown timer and a stopwatch, but we don't consider those applications a huge loss here. Work time offerings include IMAP4 and POP3 e-mail, PC syncing, an Infrared port, Bluetooth 2.0 (with a stereo profile), voice commands, and a speakerphone. The 5700 also brings instant messaging and support for push-to-talk networks, but keep in mind those two features are carrier dependent. As a result, you may not be available to use them in the United States on an unlocked model. For the chronically lost, the 5700 also comes with GPS support for mapping, landmarks, and point-to-point navigation.

With so many diversions, we were glad to see the 5700 increase the measly 5MB of internal memory that the 5300 offered to a more robust 128MB of flash storage and 64MB of RAM. That gives you a lot more space to keep a big phone book and store lots of pictures and applications. And for even more storage the MicroSD slot accommodates card up to 2GB in size.

As a Nokia Xpress Music phone, the 5700's highlight is its music player. Like the 5300, the 5700 has everything we look for a in a music handset: there's stereo Bluetooth as well as a large selection of features; it's easy to transfer files to the phone with the Nokia Music Manager software; it's user-friendly with a simple interface and well-designed controls; it has few restrictions; it offers plenty of memory; and last but certainly not least, it offers exceptional sound quality over stereo speakers. The player supports, MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WMA files.