Still, the typical XpressMusic phone buyer may not be looking for family album quality snaps, and Nokia does offer the option of sharing images – and video clips – online, with options to upload to services including Flickr, Vox and the Nokia Ovi service.

Video capture quality may not be great – shooting at QVGA resolution max at a wobbly15 frames per second – but playback of video downloaded to the phone using the RealPlayer app is decent quality. The screen may be too small for truly satisfying viewing, but it plays back nice and smoothly.

N-Gage

XpressMusic buyers may appreciate more the N-Gage gaming capability of this phone than the megapixel count. With a more flexible 8-way D-pad control than normal, and the doubling up as some buttonry as gaming controls, it's easy to play and enjoy the sophisticated games, and trial versions of games, you can download.

The multiplayer and community elements of the game may also get users reaching more for the gaming options than the camera ones, and offers a bit more – and different – to distinguish the 5320 in the busy mid-tier music phone market.

Online services

Mapping is becoming another Nokia mid-tier staple application, and although there's no GPS receiver inside, Nokia Maps software is included. This offers over-the-air route planning and searches, using addresses and key words, plus a nearby service and places finder. You can hook it up via Bluetooth to a standalone GPS receiver for exact positioning, but don't expect built in Sat Nav.

This web-based service is one of several that are now standard for Nokia devices. Yahoo! Go and Nokia's WideSets widgets apps are included for a choice of apps offering aggregated online information updates, news, email and other useful services on one screen.

As you'd expect on an S60 smartphone, there's plenty of flexibility to add your own applications to the pre-loaded set. You can use a Download! tool onboard to check out what Nokia's currently offering. But there's a suitably extensive set of organiser functions and office tools already stashed inside.

These include a calendar, convertor, calculator, notes, voice recorder, dictionary and translator, and text to voice reader software. Also, Quickoffice and PDF viewers are installed, allowing documents files attached to emails or copied over to the phone to be read or viewed.

Battery performance

Voice call performance was perfectly acceptable on this handset, with no complaints on sound quality or call holding.

Nokia quotes optimum battery performance figures of up to 300 hours standby time or up to 2.5 hours of talktime in 3G coverage, or 4 hours talktime on GSM-only networks, which is reasonable but not outstanding. How much you get in practice will depend on just how much you hit that music 'Play' button and do other stuff.

Nokia says with music playback only, you can get 24 hours battery life, or alternatively N-Gage gaming will reduce this to 4.5 hours. In tests, our average phone use with some music gave us around 2.5 days of action between charges.

Gadget phone

While it's currently top of the tree as far as the XpressMusic series is concerned, the 5320 XpressMusic is overall towards the lower end of Nokia's smartphone range, lacking top-drawer features like Wi-Fi, GPS and a high quality camera.

It may not look a pulse-racer in the XpressMusic range, but its key music playing performance can be exceptional through the right earphones, and with N-Gage gaming and a decent spread of additional gadgetry, there's enough value for money appeal.

If it came with Comes With Music, it could be even more attractive.

Looks: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
Features: 3.5/5
Call quality: 4.5/5
Value: 4/5