Nokia X6 Smartphone Reviews and Deals
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A snazzy and compact smartphone, the highly responsive 3.2-inch touchscreen on the X6 really shines.
But it's not just a pretty face - there's a wealth of features, such as the five megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and dual LED flash.
This Nokia X6 has 16GB of memory, perfect for filling with movies you can watch in widescreen, while the media player is great for music too (as is the 3.5mm headphone jack).
It has connectivity covered, with 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus A-GPS with Ovi Maps for your sat nav needs. Web browsing and email complete a great package, all running on the Symbian v9.4 OS.
Nokia X6 review
Good
Looks the part, feels solid, lots of storage
Bad
Interface offers disappointing user experience
Overview
Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia used to be the preferred choice for many mobile users thanks to its easy to use phones. However, with the advent of the smartphone and increased competition from rival producers it has started to lose market share. So does the new X6 buck the trend? Orange was good enough to send us one so we could find out.
But anyone who loved the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will find plenty to like about the Nokia X6 (although that had its faults, particularly with its unwieldy resistive touchscreen). The X6 not only has a much better resistive touchscreen but comes armed with an enormous catalogue of free music being thrown in as part of the package. So this is a model that's definitely going to appeal to people who spend their days playing tunes.
The X6 will certainly grab the attention of any smartphone aficionado with its chunky but stylish looks. Pulling it out of the box for the first time it feels good in your hand, even without the weight of the battery, suggesting a rugged build quality. It's a little heavy on the plastic though and lacks the reassuringly metallic feel of some of the smartphone competition out there.
The case itself has little in the way of buttons or controls although the thickness of the handset leads you to believe there might be a slide-out keyboard tucked way inside. However, power it up and you soon find that pretty much everything needed for day-to-day mobile phone duties is found on the 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen running a Symbian-based operating system.
Work
The Nokia X6 should be well suited to most needs during working hours, with 32, 16 or 8GB of internal storage being more than adequate for on-the-go document needs. The phone takes a second or two to boot up but once the screen interface appears everything is set out rather nicely. The on-screen buttons promise plenty and it’s relatively easy to master the overall way the menu system works.
However, once you start using the touchscreen you find that it falls short of many of its rivals in terms of usability. That's a shame, because the colour and clarity of the screen itself is excellent. The brightness also amends itself on the fly depending on the conditions you're using the phone in, which is handy when you’re out and about. Fingertip control of the touchscreen is okay, but the operating system feels a little slow on the uptake when issuing some commands.
If you need specific tools for all sorts of jobs then it's handy having the option of using the Nokia Ovi Store, so workplace activities such as calendar syncing and other organisational tools can be found and used for practical purposes.
Play
The stand out feature of the X6 is without doubt its capacity for playing music thanks in the main to the Finnish phone producers very own Comes With Music service. There are endless tracks that can be downloaded and saved to the phone, thanks to the capacious storage on offer. The Nokia Ovi Suite software helps you carry out this and other phone management tasks, but it has to be said that it's less intuitive than something like the iTunes Store.
When it comes to cameras then Nokia has long been building decent specification lenses into its handsets and the X6 is no exception. A 5 megapixel sensor and Carl Zeiss optics means that it's more than able to handle a picture-taking challenge. The results are suitably impressive, and of course with all that on-board storage you'll have plenty of room to store multiple images.
As with most on-board cameras found on phones, the tools to help you with picture-taking tasks are rather primitive, but considering that the end results are very serviceable. Meanwhile, the video shooting option is reasonable, returning 30fps and playback on the screen works to great effect thanks to its really vibrant qualities.
There's an FM radio that works well enough, a 3.5mm headphone jack allows you to connect headphones of your own choosing, which further underlines the tendency for the X6 to target music buffs as its main customer target. Just in case you've forgotten to pack your headphones for a trip there are also built-in speakers that work surprisingly well given the size of the phone itself.
Connectivity
The X6 comes with everything you need to access the mobile internet on the move, with 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi and GPRS. It requires a little more fiddling around to do this than some phones we could mention, and again, the feeling was that the Symbian OS doesn’t allow essential tasks to be carried out quite as seamlessly as, say, an Android powered handset.
Nevertheless, the web browsing is decent while there is provision for emailing and social networking, which can all be done with relative ease once you've configured the options to meet your needs. Incidentally, with many phone users now using their handsets for social networking Nokia has equipped the X6 with a really handy Contacts bar that displays instant updates from all of your chosen networks.
We also found that the on-board Bluetooth option proved pretty handy too, and an optional extra for the X6 includes Bluetooth headsets, meaning that this is a really nifty handset for catching up with music or movies without the need for having pesky trailing cables. A nice touch.
Performance
The Nokia X6 offers reasonable performance considering the power-packed features that are found on-board. However, some users new to the Symbian OS might not find it has quite the same level of zing that other operating systems offer.
Nokia also seems to have lost some of its usability appeal too and this is a phone that needs a little patience to fully master. Once you've got the hang of how the menus tick then it offers serviceable performance, although it would be good to see if Nokia can tweak the OS in order to give it an added spring to its step.
Verdict
The X6 is tailor made for music fans thanks to its formidable features on that front. Less impressive is the Symbian operating system that can tend to dawdle during some tasks. The Nokia is nicely designed, well built and oozes style, although the interface lacks the charm of something like HTC's Sense.
Nevertheless, it's got bumper storage capabilities, has most tools that any smartphone user will need and feels durable enough to survive the rigours of day to day use.
Nokia X6 specification and features
- Model
- Nokia X6
- Manufacturer
- Nokia
- Operating system
- Symbian S60 5th edit
- Colours
- Black, blue, pink, red, silver, white
Mobile internet
- WiFi
- Yes
- 3G
- Yes
- HSDPA
- Yes
Size
- Size
- 111mm x 51mm x 14mm
- Screen size
- 3.2"
- Screen Resolution
- 360x640
- Weight
- 122g
Features
- Talktime
- 8 hrs
- Standby
- 400 hrs
- Touchscreen
- Yes
- QWERTY keyboard
- No
- Camera
- 5 megapixel
- Video
- Yes
- GPS
- Yes
- Bluetooth
- Yes
- Music Phone
- Yes
- FM Radio
- Yes
- Quad Band
- No
