Updated: read our full review of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Nokia launched its own warrior into the touchscreen phone market today, in the hope it would slay all fruity-based rivals. But unfortunately it falls a little short.

The phone itself is nicely built, feeling sturdy in the hand and the entire screen is easily reached. However, it's a little bit thick, and might cause the standard mobile bulge in the pocket if that's your method of carrying it around.

The screen is, as Nokia says, class-leading however, and is very crisp and bright from the outset.

And it should be noted that the price of this handset, around £220 without subsidy, really is a great price point, meaning it will probably debut for a very low price with most carriers, and even free with many price plans.

Where the heart is

The home screen offers you the chance to pick four contacts to have as you main focus, i.e. you'll be able to see what they're doing social network-wise via an updated RSS feed, and all conversations, tagged photos etc will be shown in a list below each person.

There's also a touch sensitive physical button in the top right hand corner that allows you access to the media bar, which allows the user the chance to pick the internet, photos or other media whenever they fancy it.

However, when using this for multiple applications, the main problem with handset becomes apparent: the S60 OS. It might have worked for handsets in the past, but is in dire need of an upgrade, especially in the face of the recently released Android among others.

Too many applications slows the handset down to a halt, and there's often a perceptible lag or delay in music playback when switching between applications, which might be acceptable to Nokia stalwarts, but will irk newbies to the Finnish way of life.

Media friendly

However, this device does do one of the things it was born to do well, and that's play music and media. Perhaps lacking the intuition of other rival handsets in music playback, the tunes are crisp and clear through the 3,5mm headphone jack, and are belting through the super-loud stereo speakers (though we beg you to NEVER use this feature in public).

Flicking through photos is... OK, but its through video playback the device excels. Movies are crisp and clear, and the screen is large enough to be considered a viable alternative to an Archos, or day we say it, an iPod touch.

Accessing music over the Music Store is rather flash as well, and given this is going to be one of the flagship Comes with Music handsets, it jolly well should be.

A few clicks of internet fun will see you through to a veritable treasure trove of artists that found nearly everything we could think of, and with unlimited downloads this could be a real winner in the mobile music market.

Message in a Tube

Text entry might be a mundane issue for physically-keyed handsets, but on touchscreens becomes all important.

You've got four options here: full QWERTY, mini QWERTY (for portrait mode), handwriting recognition and normal keypad.

Working with your fingers in full QWERTY mode is relatively pleasing, and is as accurate as you'd need (unless you have big old fingers).

The keypad works as well as physical keys, though the handwriting recognition is a pain to get used to, even if you use the included plectrum for novelty value.

But overall you can get your message across with relative ease, though of course it still doesn't beat actually pressing a button to key in a letter.