Smart, trim and sonically superb, the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic is one of Nokia’s best-kept secrets. It’s the slimmest N-Gage gamer, the greenest Comes with Music handset and one of the friendliest phones you could want at your fingertips. A generous 4GB microSD card and blistering HSDPA access enable you to access a mountain of all-you-can-eat music in the palm of your hand, with near-instant downloads and Say To Play voice recognition. It’s svetle shell (12mm thin) boasts a 16.7-million colour 2.2-inch display that neatly scrolls contact details and social network feeds, and gives the smooth N-Gage action all the space it needs to shine. But the Nokia 5630 XpressMusic has a serious side, too. It’s a fully paid-up S60 smartphone, letting you download apps and widgets from the new Ovi Store or try cutting-edge beta apps at Nokia Beta Labs. It’s squeaky clean green as well, thanks to smart sensors that prevent over-charging and adjust the backlight to ambient conditions, a WWF carbon footprint calculator and, when the time finally comes to say goodbye, an 80 percent recyclable body.
We say
They say
“The 5630 XpressMusic’s interface speed has been increased big time, largely thanks to the phone’s optimized software.”
Eldar Murtazin, Mobile Review
If you only do one thing
Close the curtains, clear some space and rock out to the millions of tracks at Comes with Music. If the neighbours start banging on the wall with all the noise from the built-in stereo speakers, poke your headphones in the 3.5mm jack… and maybe even turn it up a notch.
Miscellany
Just as you might wonder how Nokia squeezes N-Gage tech into such a skinny device, the whole of Europe was mystified in the 18th century by the chess-playing automaton known as the Mechanical Turk. This table-sized clockwork robot, complete with the wooden figure of a Turk that picked up pieces, would trounce all-comers at the king of games. Its inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen, toured the Turk through the courts of Europe for decades, claiming such high profile scalps as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Intrigued players could open its doors to see an intricate mechanism whirring away. It wasn’t until the 1820s that the sceptical Brit Robert Willis guessed the Turk’s secret: an expert player hidden inside a tiny hidden compartment. It was finally bought by Edgar Allan Poe’s doctor and perished in a fire in Philadelphia’s Peale Museum in 1854.