In these days when almost every mobile phone plays music, you have to wonder why Nokia bothers with its XpressMusic range. For a mobile phone that is identified by its name as focussing on music playback, users have the right to expect something very special, and to be frank, with one twisty, swivelly exception, everything you get with this handset is available elsewhere.

This is not meant to suggest that the 5700 XpressMusic isn't a fair old music player. Just that it is not exceptional.

Nokia does well to provide a two-piece headset, for example. A 2.5mm connector links into the phone itself. At the end of this is an inline controller for music playback. The earphones plug into this section via a 3.5mm connector.

This has two advantages: you can use your own preferred earphones instead of Nokia's in-ear buds, and while doing this you can listen to the built-in FM radio which requires the lower part of the headset to be connected as this contains the antenna.

The quality of music playback itself is very good. This is an S60 handset and the software is tried and tested. There's an equaliser, stereo widening, playlist management and support for the composer tag.

The phone has stereo speakers and, while this listener always has difficulty hearing stereo effects from twin speakers located close together on mobile phone hardware, there is no doubt that they deliver plenty of volume with minimal distortion.

Storage capacity on the phone itself is not great at just 128MB, but the handset comes with a 1GB MicroSD card that goes into a slot on the right-hand side of the casing. And you get a cable and software for PC connectivity which functions both for getting music onto the phone and handling the other S60 applications, including diary and contact synchronisation.

In all this we've not mentioned the key feature of this phone. The section holding the number pad can be twisted through a full 180 degrees. When you send the number pad to the back of phone it is replaced by a control panel that contains extra-large forward and back buttons and a central pause/play button. When you bring this to the front the music player automatically starts running and you are ready to listen.

Alternatively, twist the number pad section through 90 degrees and the camera software starts to run. The 2-megapixel camera, whose lens is mounted on this twisting section and has an accompanying LED flash, can be used to shoot stills and video, and the controls for music playback double as zoom and shoot buttons.

If you swivel the camera towards you, you can shoot content containing images of yourself and use it for 3G video calling, as this phone is a 3G and quad-band GSM mobile.

The twisting section is an interesting quirk, and while using it one-handed can be something of a challenge, it is rather fun. But we can't really say that the Nokia 5700 XpressMusic is a particularly special handset with regard to music playback.