[9] It was a highly anticipated device in 2008[10][11] and went on to become a commercial success with 8 million units sold a year after release.

[12] It was praised for its supplied stylus and low price, but was viewed negatively by critics for its camera and software issues.

[16][17] On the market, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic would compete with other touchscreen devices such as Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, Sony Ericsson Satio, iPhone 3G, HTC Touch Diamond, LG Renoir, LG Arena (KM900), BlackBerry Storm 9500, Samsung Pixon and Samsung i900 Omnia.

In early February 2009 the website Mobile-Review.com, which was initially very enthusiastic about the handset, published its research and concluded that the Nokia 5800 had a design flaw.

Specifically, when phones were used on a daily basis, their earpieces, produced for Nokia under contract by a third party, would cease to function in a very short time.

New earpiece parts have also been supplied to Nokia service centres and future phone repairs should permanently fix the defect.

[20] A prototype of this handset was seen in the 2008 Batman movie, The Dark Knight and a number of music videos such as Christina Aguilera's "Keeps Gettin' Better", "Womanizer" by Britney Spears, Flo Rida's "Right Round", Pitbull's "Shut It Down", The Pussycat Dolls' "Jai Ho!"

[21] On 23 January 2009, Nokia announced it had shipped the millionth 5800 XpressMusic device, even though it still had not been fully released worldwide.

This software update also saw the removal of alphanumeric keypad in landscape view during text input, which was replaced by a full QWERTY keyboard.

This new major update brought some new features available in Nokia N97, such as an upgrade to the existing web browser to version 7.2 and full kinetic scrolling and auto-full screen while browsing the web; a new music player with mini-album art in the song list and the album list, initial letter filtering of track titles in the music player while scrolling using the scroll-bar.

Search application's icon was changed and a few more minor updates for better touch sensitivity and tweaks for faster operation of the phone are present.

Firmware 51.0.006 appeared in August 2010 and contained minor bug fixes and updates to various applications.

This new major update brought the new Symbian Anna browser 7.3.1.33 and swipe to unlock feature.