The
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...
5510 is a
mobile phone
A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...
announced on October 11, 2001 and released in December of that year. The Nokia 5510 features a full
QWERTY
QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...
keyboard, an 84 x 48 monochrome display, and is notable for its digital music player, the company's first mobile phone with music player capabilities. It has a 64 MB memory for storing audio files.
Features
The 5510 shared many of the features of the
Nokia 3310
The Nokia 3310 is a discontinued GSM mobile phone announced on 1 September 2000, and released in the fourth quarter of the year, replacing the popular Nokia 3210. It sold very well, being one of the List of best-selling mobile phones, most succ ...
due to both phones sharing components with each other, such as a built-in
calculator
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-si ...
,
stopwatch
A stopwatch is a timepiece designed to measure the amount of time that elapses between its activation and deactivation.
A large digital version of a stopwatch designed for viewing at a distance, as in a sports stadium, is called a stop clock ...
and a reminder function. It also includes the same five games that came with the Nokia 3330: ''
Snake II'', ''
Space Impact
''Space Impact'' is a shoot 'em up mobile game series from Nokia. The earliest games were bundled with several of Nokia's mobile phones, whereas later titles were available for download on compatible devices. The latest instalment came in 2010.
T ...
'', ''Bumper'', ''Bantumi'', and ''Pairs II''. However, the 5510 also had the ability to play digital music files transferred onto its 64 MB internal
flash memory
Flash memory is an Integrated circuit, electronic Non-volatile memory, non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for t ...
via
USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...
encoded in LSE format via the included Nokia software (from either
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...
or WAV format); as well as being able to receive
FM radio
FM broadcasting is a method of radio broadcasting that uses frequency modulation (FM) of the radio broadcast carrier wave. Invented in 1933 by American engineer Edwin Armstrong, wide-band FM is used worldwide to transmit high fidelity, high-f ...
.
Design
Compared to other mobile phones of its generation, the 5510 is unusual in that it has an almost complete
QWERTY keyboard
QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter ...
, rather than the conventional
telephone keypad
A telephone keypad is a keypad installed on a push-button telephone or similar telecommunication device for dialing a telephone number. It was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the Bell System ...
. This keyboard is divided on the left and right sides of the front panel, with the 84 x 48 monochrome display at the center, and the navigational buttons below it (the display and navigational buttons are almost identical to those found on the 3310). Also, four black buttons are located on the side of the phone to allow quick access to the music player, FM radio, and the volume controls.
The removable backplate on the handset was designed in such a way that pressure on the middle of the plastic could easily cause the plate to crack; this was highlighted in many reviews of the model at the time of release.
Music
The 5510 could play both MP3 and AAC audio files but not in their usual formats, instead the files must be encrypted and packaged into a Lockstream Embedded (.lse) files, which was a DRM technology that ensured that the encrypted files could only be played on the device. This encryption could be achieved using the bundled Nokia PC Suite software. Additionally it could record AAC audio directly from its internal FM radio, or through its built-in
audio jack
A phone connector is a family of Cylinder, cylindrically-shaped electrical connectors primarily for Analog signal, analog audio signals. Invented in the late 19th century for Telephone switchboard, tele''phone'' switchboards, the phone conne ...
to another format with the extension .rel which only the phone could play back. The music player on the phone also has a built-in
equalizer with several pre-sets to fine-tune the music being played.
Software

The bundled version of the
Nokia Audio Manager software was designed to encode music and transfer it to the phone via USB, but encoding would typically take several minutes per song and the software only ran under Windows. The design was that files encoded and transferred to the device could not be converted back to their original formats for playing on other devices.
However alternatives to the Nokia Audio Manager did exist, such as Nokryptia,
a cross-platform command line tool distributed as source code which by exploiting a special case of the Lockstream Embedded file format could convert MP3 audio files almost instantly to the 5510 playable Lockstream Embedded format. Nokryptia worked by prefixing the MP3 file with a special header that then allowed the MP3 to follow unencrypted (the tool also supported the reverse, removing the header to restore the original MP3 file, however this was only possible on files encoded by the technique and the tool could not restore a file encoded by the Nokia Audio Manager).
References
External links
Nokia 5510 - Product info
{{Nokia phones
5510
Mobile phones with an integrated hardware keyboard
Mobile phones introduced in 2002
Portable media players