Multimedia
They don’t call it the Xpress Music edition for nothing, so obviously it has a great music player that supports MP3/AAC/WMA/MIDI formats. The player itself has pre-installed skins to jazz it up and you can also create playlists to manage your music. And of course your music can be used as ringtones.
The output via the loudspeaker is clear and loud, but I’m a bit disappointed to find out that the music quality with the stereo earphones is not all I expected it to be. It’s rather low and the clarity is questionable to certain extent. Nokia users, who loved the 3250 or the 6270 for music, would have a wee bit of concern with this.
There is an FM Radio as well and the channel pick up is good. The voice recorder comes in handy to store random thoughts or weird conversations.
The video player supports 3GPP files and you can’t install another one like Smartmovie, or any other. The good thing is that you can watch videos in full screen mode (landscape). But I’m still wondering why they leave that slight edges on the sides. I presumed Full screen meant just that – “FULL” screen. Every bit of the 2-inch display would be used up. I was also under the assumption that that this was RealPlayer, but apparently it’s not. Nevertheless, the quality was good.
Camera
I really do like the camera on the Nokia 5300. Like the 6270 or 3250 and most other new models, it uses landscape mode for capturing images and videos. Although it doesn’t have a flash, the night mode isn’t too bad. The 8x digital zoom is quick and not slow like some of the series 60 models. Plus Nokia’s image editing software makes things a little more fun.
The photo quality is quite alright considering its 1.3 megapixels. It’s not too high end, but not too bad at the same time. The settings allow you to pick the size of the pictures and videos you want, as well as use a few special settings like taking negative, sepia etc., i.e. the usual stuff. And Like I mentioned earlier the Nokia 5200, is also equipped with a camera but just to help distinguish it further from the 5200 it’s a VGA camera with 4x zoom capability. So be careful.


