accprof1 said: This is an excellent phone. Very user friendly and a sharp screen. Its built-in antenna is also much more powerful than the locked Nokia E71x I had before from AT&T. The navigation interface is a bit tricky and you need to get used to it. All in all I am very pleased. Didn't intend to write a rant. Cliff's notes: the 5800 interface is the menu-driven Symbian overlaid with some touch screen add-ons and I found it a hassle. Buy a used 2g iphone for $200 from craigslist instead. Wow, my experience was completely different. I got this phone because I cursed my Windows Mobile phone every day, despite spending way too much time on the ppcgeeks and xda-developers forums. I've installed hacked Windows Mobile ROMs and Android onto a few different HTC phones, so I'm willing to learn how to use a new device and software. I just never got used to the 5800. Even if you do find a simple way to do something basic (like silence the phone), nothing is intuitive or obvious. Also, Symbian was designed for non-touchscreen phones, and the 5800's lack of a joystick or d-pad makes everything a hassle. The menus are utterly retarded. When I have a contact selected and press the green key I don't want to see a submenu offering a choice between "voice call" and "video call". It can take several clicks through menus to do very basic things (until you learn the secret quick way, and even then, if you end up in the menus, which are, after all, the most obvious way to accomplish any task, you can easily end up three or four layers in and no closer to your goal). Ultimately, the 5800 interface is the menu-driven Symbian overlaid with some touch screen add-ons. Using a touch screen to navigate menus sucks all day long. And of course, the 5800 doesn't have multitouch. HTC does a much better job with Sense and TouchFlo; these actually improve Android and WinMo. The touch interface on the 5800 feels really rough. The screen is great but because the phone is narrow and you don't have control over the font spacing, there is much less visible text on a screen. This is a real pain when reading email because the only way to scroll is with the touchscreen scrollbar (a little unwieldy one-handed). Similarly, the widescreen format makes Opera Mobile hard to use because the zoom is either too small to read or too big to see enough to be useful. And you have to hit the tiny menus on the touchscreen. Lack of a d-pad means that I rarely bother to read email or use the web on this phone. Music sounds great on this phone, but, again, the built-in player has that pesky scrollbar and goofy menus. The nav software is a huge hassle, even after you spend some time googling for the correct settings (disable A-GPS). Entering addresses is a multi-step process. Free lifetime nav is a plus, I guess, but for usability Google Maps >>> Nokia's Ovi Maps. I paid around $175 after bing and Nokia rebate and am using it on Tmobile prepaid. If this is your intended use I recommend spending $200 for a used iphone instead. I'm taking this phone back to WalMart because I'm still within the return period. I've heard that a firmware update makes Symbian work more smoothly with the touch screen, but I'm not going to bother. This might be an OK phone if your main usage is voice calls and playing music or watching video. The feature set is unbeatable at this price, and the accessories included in the box (car mount, charger) are a nice touch. But overall it didn't work well as a smartphone for me because of the widescreen, poor text spacing and lack of usability. Bottom line: I didn't think that anything could make me long for Windows Mobile. The 5800 did it. P.S.: if you do get this phone and like to run or bike, the Nokia Sport Tracker is an outstanding app.
P.P.S.: although Skype supports almost every other Symbian phone, there isn't a native Skype app for the 5800. It works ok (i.e., with a few hassles) through fring. Edit: added cliff's notes | 