The Attack of the Mutant Squares, Part II: The Nokia X5-01

Blue Nokia X5-01Not to be outshone by Motorola, Nokia today announced at their annual Nokia Connection event in Singapore the text- and social media-focussed, square-bodied X5-01.

Yes! Marvel at the novelty of the form factor! Be dazzled by its bright colours! Feel befuddled by its gesture system!

What gesture system? Well, rather than go to the hassle of making you press a button, Nokia have decided it’s much easier to spin your phone in a circle to activate shuffle mode on the music player.

The only way I can think of being able to do this gesture is by placing your thumb gently on the centre of the screen, and spinning it between your fingers. Not that big a deal, right? Now do it with your headphones plugged in. Ah. Right.

Even the disembodied hand in the promo video can’t think of a good way to do it without letting go of the phone. Check it out at around the 1 minute mark in the video below the pretty pictures.

The other life-changing feature of the phone is the ability to shake it so “feel” how many messages you have. I guess this is so you can see if you have any unread messages while hiding the phone under your desk? But then, once you know you have messages, you’ll have to look at the screen to read them, so why didn’t you just look at the screen in the first place?

Yargh, I don’t know. Am I just a grumpy old man? You crazy kids and your technologamajiggums.

The phone will come in 5 colours (blue, purple, pink, green, black), have a 5MP camera with LED flash, 200MB internal storage with MicroSD expansion up to 32GB, 16 days of standby/24 hours music playback, and will be powered by Symbian S60 3rd Edition. It will cost about €160 when and wherever it’s released (no details just yet).

[via Symbian World, hands-on images from @mhisham and @asrialbaker]

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