Kodak EasyShare at Best Buy $99.99
Entered CNET Catalog: 05/11/2006
SKU: 5500
Manufacturer: Nokia Corp.
Manufacturer description
Project your athletic side for a truly active mobile lifestyle with the Nokia 5500 Sport. Maximize your performance by keeping your communication flowing and momentum going at the same time. Break away from convention with the text to speech capability: listen to received text messages being read out by the phone. Switch with ease between different phone modes with a one-touch swap key for convenient access to phone, music, or sports functions. Built for all conditions, the durable Nokia 5500 Sport is shock, water, and dust resistant. With the integrated digital music player you can listen to FM radio or MP3s to stay energized. Snap photos using the 2-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom - with the Nokia 5500 Sport you're geared up for play anytime, anywhere. The functions are all designed with an active user in mind, letting you continue doing what you do. It all adds up to motivation and entertainment for a sporty lifestyle.User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1
User Rating: 
3/10
Major flaw in keyboard design, design and quality not upto Nokia standards
Pros: Compact size for smart phone, decent battery life, featured, decent price
Cons: Poor keyboard design and quality, stainless steel case susceptible to dents, poor alarm feature, volume low, camera poor in low light
Review:
The phone size is very good for a smart phone and looks pretty decent. However though it is marketed as an outdoor phone, it has a SERIOUS weakness that the keypad comes of in just 2 months and if you continue to use it its breaks into pieces! When you look in you realize that a few double sided stick tapes is what holds the keypad to the frame, and you cannot replace the sticky tape (I tried using 3M double tape) And the keypad is not covered as part of the warranty in most cases and worse it is expensive to replace. Nokia should actually RECALL this phone due to this serious design weakness. The problem is now discussed in many phone review sites by the users, but Nokia has not responded, and would not be surprised if they pulled the model out of the market silently.
The phone in addition to being touted as shock proof and water proof fails to live up in any level. Each small fall causes major dents in the steel side casings in addition to the pitiful keyboard as detailed earlier. The navigation button is plated silver, and goes off in a few months, which is shocking since cheaper phones have better quality.
In addition the buttons are not very responsive, and the screen is a unusual 208x208 resolution which makes the text a bit "blurred".
Feature wise it?s pretty good with the Symbian OS 9.x having some applications cut down (e.g. NO office document tools), but the rest is fairly featured. The phone is pretty responsive, and the music player is decent (its loud, but not very user friendly in managing your play list).
The organizer feature is fair, with provisions for meetings, to-do?s, anniversary events, etc. Recurring meetings can be setup. The sync with Microsoft Outlook works well. A major disappointment is the alarm feature as you can only configure a daily alarm (you cannot indicate what dates you want the Alarm work, meaning you have to delete the alarm setting for weekends and set it up all over again on Monday!). One wonders who gathers the user requirements when developing such software!
The SMS feature is good but you cannot control the size of the font! The voice quality is good but the loudness (even at maximum) is not very good and can be hard to use in a crowded or noise environment. The speakerphone quality is good but has the same issue with volume.
The camera works fine in good light, but is miserable in low light conditions (there is no flash, though it unlikely the flash would make a big difference). The headphones provided are the usual new range Nokia headphones which are pretty decent, but the connector that fits into the phone is not very strong and can get easily dislodged. The radio is the basic feature (No RDS where you can see the messages from the Radio station), and the Radio only works when the headset is connected. Another weakness is that the equalizer cannot be used when in Radio mode.
The battery life with minimal use (a few sms?s and 2-3 calls a day) makes the battery last for 3-4 days, but when normally used its 2 days at best. The phone also has a offline mode which shuts down the phone features (aircraft friendly) and in this mode the battery lasts for several hours for music playback or camera use (The radio does not work in this mode).
Another feature that is available for this phone (and most of the new phones by many vendors) is the ability to upgrade your firmware over the Internet (the download is around 52MB). This can be useful since the smart phones tend to be a bit buggy in the early revisions. Though my phone is Rev 3.14 (Current version seems to be 3.55), it has not had any major software problems since the Symbian version used is pretty matured.
However the phone fails badly for its intended market, let alone for normal users due to the keyboard issue. I am sure many consumers who purchased this phone (like me) trusting Nokia quality would be greatly disappointed.
The phone in addition to being touted as shock proof and water proof fails to live up in any level. Each small fall causes major dents in the steel side casings in addition to the pitiful keyboard as detailed earlier. The navigation button is plated silver, and goes off in a few months, which is shocking since cheaper phones have better quality.
In addition the buttons are not very responsive, and the screen is a unusual 208x208 resolution which makes the text a bit "blurred".
Feature wise it?s pretty good with the Symbian OS 9.x having some applications cut down (e.g. NO office document tools), but the rest is fairly featured. The phone is pretty responsive, and the music player is decent (its loud, but not very user friendly in managing your play list).
The organizer feature is fair, with provisions for meetings, to-do?s, anniversary events, etc. Recurring meetings can be setup. The sync with Microsoft Outlook works well. A major disappointment is the alarm feature as you can only configure a daily alarm (you cannot indicate what dates you want the Alarm work, meaning you have to delete the alarm setting for weekends and set it up all over again on Monday!). One wonders who gathers the user requirements when developing such software!
The SMS feature is good but you cannot control the size of the font! The voice quality is good but the loudness (even at maximum) is not very good and can be hard to use in a crowded or noise environment. The speakerphone quality is good but has the same issue with volume.
The camera works fine in good light, but is miserable in low light conditions (there is no flash, though it unlikely the flash would make a big difference). The headphones provided are the usual new range Nokia headphones which are pretty decent, but the connector that fits into the phone is not very strong and can get easily dislodged. The radio is the basic feature (No RDS where you can see the messages from the Radio station), and the Radio only works when the headset is connected. Another weakness is that the equalizer cannot be used when in Radio mode.
The battery life with minimal use (a few sms?s and 2-3 calls a day) makes the battery last for 3-4 days, but when normally used its 2 days at best. The phone also has a offline mode which shuts down the phone features (aircraft friendly) and in this mode the battery lasts for several hours for music playback or camera use (The radio does not work in this mode).
Another feature that is available for this phone (and most of the new phones by many vendors) is the ability to upgrade your firmware over the Internet (the download is around 52MB). This can be useful since the smart phones tend to be a bit buggy in the early revisions. Though my phone is Rev 3.14 (Current version seems to be 3.55), it has not had any major software problems since the Symbian version used is pretty matured.
However the phone fails badly for its intended market, let alone for normal users due to the keyboard issue. I am sure many consumers who purchased this phone (like me) trusting Nokia quality would be greatly disappointed.
