Steve Litchfield has published the first part of his Nokia 5730 XpressMusic review and it looks like a bargain! “All of which does seem like quite a list, and indeed there’s a lot to discuss below, but don’t let the table above kid you into thinking that these aren’t, at heart, the same phone. If you look at the positioning of all the ports and side keys, if you look at the qwerty keyboard layout and spacing, if you compare audio and multimedia results, if you look at the recesses for ribbons and mechanism on the underside of the main keyboard, you’ll quickly deduce that the E75 and 5730 are twins, separated at birth and led down slightly different life paths.

It’s slightly odd that the 5730 XpressMusic has appeared so much later than the E75, and galling considering that there’s nothing cutting edge in its firmware that might provide a clue for this timing – after all the 5730 still has Nokia Maps v2 and the ‘old’ version of S60 Web. There’s not even an Ovi Store link. Clearly, the 5730 was designed and specified concurrently with the E75, but the timescales for either production or marketing slipped and then the summer break got in the way. Well, that’s my theory anyway. (One compensation for the wait is that a digital compass got added to the GPS chip in the meantime, of which more later.)

But almost all potential buyers won’t have seen an E75 in the flesh, so for the bulk of this review I’m going to treat the 5730 standalone, as a smartphone in its own right. For the guy or gal picking this up on a modest monthly contract in the High Street, what are they going to love and what are they going to hate (if anything)? I will put in some E75 comparison quips where needed, but I’ll try not to let these dominate!”