Nokia 5530 XpressMusic Review - A plunge into mediocrity

Another day, another Nokia XpressMusic phone. This time we are going to take a look at a mid-range music phone, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic. 
Besides its audio-centric features, the handset comes with a resistive touchscreen and runs on the Symbian 9.4 5th Edition platform. These attributes are shared by almost all XpressMusic phones launched after Nokia 5800. The Finnish giant seems to take the XpressMusic lineup very seriously, hence the diversity of the handsets included in the series.
It looks like Nokia aims to design an XpressMusic phone for anyone, by adding or removing features from a “standard” set. Some of these handsets feature a QWERTY keyboard or a touchscreen, others have a good camera, while some simply rely on sound quality, depending on their target.
Announced in June 2009, Nokia 5530 was launched on the market in August 2009 and can be bought for about 240 US dollars without a subscription. Potential customers can choose from five available color schemes: Red on black, Blue on white, Grey on black, Pink on white and Yellow on white.


Design

Even though the XpressMusic series is one of the largest handset lineups made by Nokia, it seems that design wasn't the manufacturer's main concern. 
Once Nokia 5800, the company's first touchscreen phone, was launched, the entire lineup that came afterwards looks like it has been standardized. Of course, there are some differences, but “evolution” is not the first word that comes to your mind when you compare Nokia 5800 with any other XpressMusic handset.

Display and Camera 

Nokia 5530 features a TFT 2.9-inch resistive touchscreen that supports 16 million colors with 360x640-pixel resolution, which can also be controlled with the stylus included in the sales package. Unfortunately, going back to a resistive touchscreen after using a capacitive one for a long time can cause finger damage. Seriously speaking, I had a hard time typing fast or dialing unless I was using the stylus.

Menu and Software 

Nokia 5330 runs Symbian 9.4, with the S60 5th Edition interface, the same as its XpressMusic touchscreen siblings. Little to no improvements have been applied to the graphical interface, and the same goes for its functionality.

Communication 

Nokia 5330 is a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900) handset that features GPRS and EDGE class 32 as the only options for data transfer connections when you're not near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Processor and Memory 

Nokia 5330 is powered by the same ARM11 family processor running at speeds of up to 434 Mhz that has been embedded in N97 model. The device works pretty smoothly, but I have noticed some lags when using other applications while the browser is open.


Multimedia

The smartphone features the same standard looking music player as Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, with little to no cosmetic changes. You have five pre-installed equalizer modes: Bass booster, Classical, Jazz, Pop and Rock. Other settings are: Balance, Loudness and Stereo widening.


Battery

The 1,000 mAh Li-Ion (BL-4U) battery has an officially stated life expectancy of 336 hours for standby mode and 4 hours and 45 minutes for talk time mode. The manufacturer also states a play back autonomy of almost 27 hours official.

After one week of full use I only need to charge the phone once. Overall, I would say the phone has an excellent battery, which is a perfect fit for the phone's features.

Energy Harvesting: Nanogenerators Grow Strong Enough to Power Small Conventional Electronic Devices

Blinking numbers on a liquid-crystal display (LCD) often indicate that a device's clock needs resetting. But in the laboratory of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, the blinking number on a small LCD signals the success of a five-year effort to power conventional electronic devices with nanoscale generators that harvest mechanical energy from the environment using an array of tiny nanowires.

In this case, the mechanical energy comes from compressing a nanogenerator between two fingers, but it could also come from a heartbeat, the pounding of a hiker's shoe on a trail, the rustling of a shirt, or the vibration of a heavy machine. While these nanogenerators will never produce large amounts of electricity for conventional purposes, they could be used to power nanoscale and microscale devices -- and even to recharge pacemakers or iPods.

Wang's nanogenerators rely on the piezoelectric effect seen in crystalline materials such as zinc oxide, in which an electric charge potential is created when structures made from the material are flexed or compressed. By capturing and combining the charges from millions of these nanoscale zinc oxide wires, Wang and his research team can produce as much as three volts -- and up to 300 nanoamps.

"By simplifying our design, making it more robust and integrating the contributions from many more nanowires, we have successfully boosted the output of our nanogenerator enough to drive devices such as commercial liquid-crystal displays, light-emitting diodes and laser diodes," said Wang, a Regents' professor in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering. "If we can sustain this rate of improvement, we will reach some true applications in healthcare devices, personal electronics, or environmental monitoring."

Recent improvements in the nanogenerators, including a simpler fabrication technique, were reported online last week in the journal Nano Letters. Earlier papers in the same journal and in Nature Communications reported other advances for the work, which has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Science Foundation.

"We are interested in very small devices that can be used in applications such as health care, environmental monitoring and personal electronics," said Wang. "How to power these devices is a critical issue."

The earliest zinc oxide nanogenerators used arrays of nanowires grown on a rigid substrate and topped with a metal electrode. Later versions embedded both ends of the nanowires in polymer and produced power by simple flexing. Regardless of the configuration, the devices required careful growth of the nanowire arrays and painstaking assembly.

In the latest paper, Wang and his group members Youfan Hu, Yan Zhang, Chen Xu, Guang Zhu and Zetang Li reported on much simpler fabrication techniques. First, they grew arrays of a new type of nanowire that has a conical shape. These wires were cut from their growth substrate and placed into an alcohol solution.

The solution containing the nanowires was then dripped onto a thin metal electrode and a sheet of flexible polymer film. After the alcohol was allowed to dry, another layer was created. Multiple nanowire/polymer layers were built up into a kind of composite, using a process that Wang believes could be scaled up to industrial production.

When flexed, these nanowire sandwiches -- which are about two centimeters by 1.5 centimeters -- generated enough power to drive a commercial display borrowed from a pocket calculator.

Wang says the nanogenerators are now close to producing enough current for a self-powered system that might monitor the environment for a toxic gas, for instance, then broadcast a warning. The system would include capacitors able to store up the small charges until enough power was available to send out a burst of data.

While even the current nanogenerator output remains below the level required for such devices as iPods or cardiac pacemakers, Wang believes those levels will be reached within three to five years. The current nanogenerator, he notes, is nearly 100 times more powerful than what his group had developed just a year ago.

Writing in a separate paper published in October in the journal Nature Communications, group members Sheng Xu, Benjamin J. Hansen and Wang reported on a new technique for fabricating piezoelectric nanowires from lead zirconate titanate -- also known as PZT. The material is already used industrially, but is difficult to grow because it requires temperatures of 650 degrees Celsius.

In the paper, Wang's team reported the first chemical epitaxial growth of vertically-aligned single-crystal nanowire arrays of PZT on a variety of conductive and non-conductive substrates. They used a process known as hydrothermal decomposition, which took place at just 230 degrees Celsius.

With a rectifying circuit to convert alternating current to direct current, the researchers used the PZT nanogenerators to power a commercial laser diode, demonstrating an alternative materials system for Wang's nanogenerator family. "This allows us the flexibility of choosing the best material and process for the given need, although the performance of PZT is not as good as zinc oxide for power generation," he explained.

And in another paper published in Nano Letters, Wang and group members Guang Zhu, Rusen Yang and Sihong Wang reported on yet another advance boosting nanogenerator output. Their approach, called "scalable sweeping printing," includes a two-step process of (1) transferring vertically-aligned zinc oxide nanowires to a polymer receiving substrate to form horizontal arrays and (2) applying parallel strip electrodes to connect all of the nanowires together.

Using a single layer of this structure, the researchers produced an open-circuit voltage of 2.03 volts and a peak output power density of approximately 11 milliwatts per cubic centimeter.

"From when we got started in 2005 until today, we have dramatically improved the output of our nanogenerators," Wang noted. "We are within the range of what's needed. If we can drive these small components, I believe we will be able to power small systems in the near future. In the next five years, I hope to see this move into application."