Nokia 5300 XpressMusic (Unlocked)

I had the misfortune of owning two of these handsets, and as you can see by my title, I wasn't pleased with either of them.

I got the 5300 as an insurance replacement for my Nokia 6133 which was run over by a car (but still worked). Feature for feature the phones are very similar, with a couple notable differences. This phone can actually play MP3 files as ringtones without having to convert them to Windows Media Audio (WMA) files, whereas my older 6133 couldn't, and it had the external player buttons, and a better headset setup. This phone also is not a quadband world capable phone, whereas the 6133 was. TMobile claimed that shouldn't make a difference in the US, but it did seem to affect me, as this phone simply didn't work out for me as well as the 6133.

I admit that I had troubles out of the box with both handsets I received. The first one I had would randomly lose audio (which I found out from TMobile wasn't as rare to the model as one would think), and it also kept eating my minutes. Something I later figured out was from poor lock settings. The bad thing about locking the phone is that if you lock it, and set the auto lock, it also locks the external player buttons, a minor nuisance, but it is VERY easy to unlock (just slide the slider up and down). TMobile eventually replaced the first handset I had with a second one, and that one would just randomly lose signal. I would lose signal in areas I usually had excellent service, and when I borrowed other phones from TMobile users, those phones did not have the signal loss I received. This also occured while I was in Columbus, Ohio, and TMobile has VERY GOOD coverage there, but not on my 5300.

After that I ended up copntacting TMobile and requesting another 6133 instead of this phone, and I have been much happier, although I did like some of the extras on this phone that weren't on the 6133, I just feel that the 6133 is a better handset altogether.

While this didn't happen with my phone, I have also heard that it is easy to ruin the main LCD screens on this handset, and while I didn't ruin my screen, my first handset did get a decent sized scratch on the screen, and I have no idea how it happened, as I never dropped the phone.

I hope that if anyone uses this phone they have better luck with it than what I did, because if it actually works as it is supposed to, it could be a really good phone, but it just didn't work out for me