Nokia 5310 review: XpressMusic (See all reviews)

Nokia 5310’s display is a 2-inch QVGA (240x320 pixels), capable of showing up to 16.7 million separate colors. We haven’t been very much impressed with it but it is bright and has vivid colors. It also has a good legibility under direct sunlight.

Unfortunately the backlighting and contrast are not user-configurable. In the menu you can only set the phone's behavior in power-saving mode. An animated screen saver can be activated on the display and, consequently, convert into a screen-saver showing a digital clock, the current date, and icons indicating any missed events.

The user interface Nokia has used on this model is the standard Series 40. As for the navigation and phone control, we must say they are identical to Nokia 6500 classic.

Nokia 5310 offers a vast number of configurable options but at the price of somehow complicated menu structure and navigation.

When in stand-by mode, the display shows the pre-selected wallpaper plus signal strength, battery status and time in the top bar. The bottom bar is reserved for the descriptions of the functions assigned to the center of the navigation key and the two context keys.

The center of the navigation key opens the main menu, while the context keys can be assigned any other particular function. The central area provides instant access to the music player. At the very bottom events from the calendar are displayed set for the current day.

The main menu in Nokia 5310 classic can be visualized in four different ways: as grid of icons with or without captions, as list of items or tabs. The phone has six pre-installed themes.

Whenever an active theme is selected, the background color of the entire menu together with the display will immediately change.

We must say that during our tests the menu responded quickly without any lag and none of the rumored restarts have occurred.

Nokia 5310 comes with six predefined ringing profiles and the good news is that the phone can operate without a SIM card inserted under the Flight mode and can be used as a regular MP3 player.