The candy-bar-style 5310 is mostly gunmetal gray, but there's a splash of bright color along the
sides of the screen. (Our test handset had red accents, but you can opt for orange or purple.) Unusually slim for a Nokia model, at 4.1 by 1.8 by .4 inches (HWD), it feels solid yet weighs only 3 ounces. The front of the phone is dominated by a good-looking, bright, 2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel display. To the left of the screen are music controls; below it are the number buttons, whose convex design feels good beneath the fingertips.Voice calls on the tri-band (850/1800/1900 MHz) 5310's earpiece sound terrific. They're loud, clear, and as reliable as you can get on T-Mobile network. Transmission through the microphone was generally good, but was heavily dependent on an at-times-wobbly network. During testing, I experienced some network-related voice issues like extreme compression. The speakerphone is fairly loud, but it's located at the bottom of the phone on the back, so it's way too easy to cover with your hand. There wasn't much noise cancellation in the microphone or speaker.
Being a music phone, Nokia 5310 features a standard 3.5mm headset jack on the top, and also supports mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. The phone is bundled with a pair of earbuds with a microphone and shirt clip. Nokia's voice-dialing system is usually poor, but the 5310 is set up so that you can't use voice dialing until you have trained the phone, by reading a list of names supplied by Nokia; this seemed to increase the phone's accuracy at guessing what I was trying to dial.
Its slender form means the 5310 has a small battery, and the 7 hours 6 seconds of talk time we got in our rundown test is low for a T-Mobile phone. Ringtones were of medium volume, but the vibrate alert felt a bit weak.
The 5310 is a good voice phone, but its real forte is music. . One way to get your tunes onto the phone is via microSD card—the slot is inconveniently located under the back cover, but at least it isn't under the battery. T-Mobile includes a 1GB card, but the phone accepted our 8GB SanDisk card without a complaint. (There's also 30MB of onboard memory.)
The music player will play WMA files—protected or not—and unprotected AAC and MP3 files, and it sounded good with a standard pair of headphones. The built-in speaker is loud, but it's on the back, which isn't my favorite location. Plugging in headphones also lets you activate the FM radio, which got good reception on our tests. The music keys on the side of the phone control both the music player and the FM radio.
Since it's a Nokia, the 5310 hooks up to PCs with the company's free PC Suite software. This is a smart solution for syncing contacts and calendars, and moving music and photos between your phone and PC easily. You can also sync with Windows Media Player, transferring songs and playlists but not videos. Video support, in general, is a problem: Our test 3GP format videos wouldn't play at all.
For a lower-end handset, the 5310 provides decent Internet connectivity. T-Mobile's OZ instant-messaging and e-mail clients have been improved from earlier iterations. The IM client lets you log into AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! all at the same time, and shows your entire AIM buddy list, which is unusual for a feature-phone client. The e-mail client supports a range of popular ISPs, including AOL, EarthLink, Gmail, and Yahoo!, but not generic POP3 mail. It shows messages in text-only format in an attractive, tabbed layout.
The WAP browser is run-of-the-mill; it will try to show desktop-formatted sites, but typically doesn't succeed, and should be used only for mobile-optimized sites. T-Mobile has enhanced the browser with a Java app to let you browse its online store and a number of limited, preprogrammed information sites. But you can't run the superior Opera Mini browser because T-Mobile bars third-party Java programs from accessing the Internet on any of its feature phones. In testing, the phone did well on the JBenchmark Java gaming benchmark tests and on multimedia tests.
The 2-megapixel camera is pretty awful, snapping washed-out, bluish pictures in daylight, and hideously blurry pictures in low light. The 176-by-144, 10-frames-per-second video-recording mode takes compressed, choppy videos with visible color artifacting. The camera is not only disappointing but also difficult to access: In default mode, it requires seven clicks before you can take a shot.
The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic makes solid voice calls and plays music well—plus it's really cute. And at $50 with a contract, it's cheap too. If you care less about looks and more about future-proofing, go for the Nokia 6263: It's equipped for T-Mobile's new 3G network, which could further improve voice quality. But if you want an inexpensive, attractive T-Mobile phone you can groove to, slip a 5310 into your pocket.
source : http://www.pcmag.com/
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