Nokia - 5300 Cell Phone Review

I purchased my Nokia 5300 XpressMusic at full price ($180 at the time) because I didn't want to upgrade my T-Mobile contract (unhappy with their lacking coverage). I loved it for the first few days until the novelty wore off. The expandable memory (MicroSD) slot is great if you actually use your phone to listen to music, but doing so will kill the battery quickly. The battery life is sub-par for a near $200 phone. I found myself charging it every day to a day-and-a-half. I never got around to using the music player on a regular basis, though a couple of times I did use it the speaker quality was surprising decent.

The big problems started coming after two months when suddenly I woke up one morning and the screen was dead, but the phone was ringing. I attributed the dead screen to poor contacts from the slider mechanism. Folks, stay away from slider phones. I have had a couple now and they all seem to suffer this problem at one point or another. Perhaps I am overly hard on my phones, though I really don't think so. Anyway, I smacked the phone around a little bit since I didn't feel like disassembling it, and it worked again (imagine that!) A week later it was dead again, and this time for good. I smacked it quite a bit (I'm really very lazy) and ended up cracking the exterior screen protector, thus voiding any chance at exercising warranty privileges.

Overall the phone was fine until it died, just like every phone I've owned for the last five years. I plan on buying an unlocked higher-end phone and using it when T-Mobile's 3G coverage expands. Forget the cheap phones because you usually get what you pay for.