No one can doubt that Nokia is determined to mark out some serious mobile music territory for itself, what with its recent N81 and N95 8GB-packing smartphone releases, and a series of high profile music service announcements (including Nokia Music Store and its Comes With Music).

At the same time, it's turned its attention to lower down the handset range, too, by refreshing its XpressMusic music phone portfolio. The 5310 XpressMusic is one of a pair of affordable newcomers to the loud and proud - if low-key - XpressMusic line.

Whereas Sony Ericsson seemingly has a new Walkman phone every few weeks, reinforcing its mobile music branding, Nokia's so far taken a relatively sedate approach to releasing music-optimised XpressMusic-tagged phones.

The 5310 XpressMusic aims to hit its target youth-market with a slick slimline look, featuring prominent colour contrast music player controls, and plenty of tune-playing punch; Nokia supplies the 5310 with a 2GB MicroSD card in-box to supplement its modest 30MB internal storage.

And at a pre-pay price that's initially pitched around the £120-£130 mark, this is a phone that is going to grab attention with its price-tag too.

The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic doesn't have 3G built in for fast over the air downloading - it makes do with quad-band GPRS - although Nokia has included a few useful Web-based apps. The 5310 is also light on the snapping front, with a rather basic 2-megapixel camera on the back that makes do without autofocus or flash.

Music, though, is of course the headline act on the 5310. Complementing Nokia's restyled music and video player inside, there's an FM radio, plus Nokia has slipped in a 3.5mm headphone jack, enabling users to upgrade headphones easily from the supplied pair.

A set of three large music player keys are ranged down the side of the display on coloured aluminium side panels - red or blue - that set off strikingly against the rest of the black and graphite grey bodywork.

That chassis is just 9.9mm thin, and with a weight of just 71g this candybar feels suitably light in the hand and comfortable in the pocket - unlike some of Nokia's earlier, chunky XpressMusic handsets.

The numberpad keys are a bit plasticky, but are large enough, arranged in a straightforward grid, and slightly curved to make them suitable for no-fuss texting. The display is a 2-inch QVGA (240x320 pixels), capable of showing up to 16.7 million separate colours; it's not the biggest array, but it is bright and vivid.

Nokia has unsurprisingly used its standard Series 40 user interface on this model, and the navigation controls are a familiar set of buttons arranged around a central D-pad. A pair of softkeys flank it, while there are standard call and end keys beneath these.

The D-pad and softkeys can offer shortcuts to a range of features. They arrive pre-set, but it's simple to reconfigure them to your own tastes. Similarly, out of the box, the standby screen is set for Active Standby, with a quintet of icons lines up on a bar at the top of the display for shortcuts to functions.

Other fast access options - like music player and radio, and calendar reminders, are listed down the screen. You can re-set all of this too to suit your own requirements. That makes for a flexible and quick menu access set-up - although you can choose simply to hit the central menu option and delve through the options from a standard grid format.

The conspicuous music player controls with their diamond etched music symbols look good on the 5310 XpressMusic and trumpet what this phone majors on.

Get the music player or radio in motion, and you can control the tunes - play, pause, forward or reverse - even when the music is strutting its stuff in the background. With 2GB of track-space to play with out of the box (thanks to the supplied MicroSD card) you can get hundreds of tunes onto the 5310 before you even consider adding further cards (it can accommodate up to 4GB capacity MicroSDs).

The music player user interface is similar to that used on other recent Nokia's latest Series 40 models, though you can tweak the themes on the 5310's player with additional skins. The player supports MP3, MP4, AAC, eAAc+, and WMA music file formats, and tracks are organised in familiar MP3 player style - by playlists, artists, albums, genres, and there's a video option.

Cover art can be copied over to the phone too. For any music player, good sound quality is the key requirement, and the 5310 XpressMusic gets this spot on.