Nokia C6-00 review

With Symbian^3 arriving hot on the heels of this device, we wonder if the C6 has any caché at all, but Nokia has pulled the stops out anyway, equipping the C6 with HSDPA, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, a 5 megapixel camera and a slide-out keyboard. There is even that rarest of things these days, a front facing camera for making video calls.

The Nokia C6 is quite a small handset. It feels very comfortable to hold, and the sliding mechanism is extremely solid. The keyboard pops out and back with a really loud thunk. But the overall impression is of something chunkier than, say, the HTC Desire which sports a considerably bigger screen. That is because the Nokia C6 is thicker than the average. It has to be to support that keyboard.

The keyboard has an unusual design with a physical divide half way along it which does not separate the qwerty keys equally, but rather leaves more of them on the left than the right. This looks a bit weird and experienced typists might find it takes a little time to accommodate. The space bar, in particular, is irritating because it is offset to the right.

There is a separate @ key which regular emailers or tweeters will like, and, on the far right, a navigation pad that you can use to move around within and between apps. It might seem odd that this is here alongside a touchscreen, but it can come in handy at times. We found it useful when web browsing, for example.

However, the need to make space for the navigation pad means that the qwerty keys themselves are on the small side. You will need fingertip precision to be accurate with them.

If you are working in portrait mode without the keyboard on view you can use a T9 style keypad or handwriting recognition. The latter works fine, but you’ll need to resort to a finger tip or some sort of stylus for accuracy. The resistive screen means you can use the bottom of a pen or something like that.

The screen is really a bit small for easy use though Nokia does a good job of cramming access to features onto it. The Nokia C6 has a widget-based approach to its single home screen, with six areas available for shortcuts.

These rearrange themselves automatically as you flick the screen between wide and tall modes and there is plenty of opportunity to customise what you see.

The camera performs quite well but on bright sunny days outdoors it struggled to produce crisp, vibrant results. That’s not unusual for a smartphone, of course, and there is a good range of shooting options on offer.

The rather small 200MB of on board memory is augmented right out of the box with a 2GB microSD card. We can’t fault Nokia for its attitude to applications. The Nokia C6 is brimming with them from the FM radio to Ovi Maps, PDF reader, unit converter, a drawing app, and plenty more.

In general use we found the processor to be a bit slow to respond to finger presses. It was nothing excessive, but this is not a blisteringly fast handset. On the other hand the battery life is good and unless you thrash power-hungry elements like the GPS it might deliver two days of usage between charges.

In the end, though, S60 5th Edition just feels out of touch. The need to double tap at some times and single tap at others, the nested menu structure, and the general look and feel of the visual design all seem behind the times.

The refinements that Symbian^3 will bring in future handsets are long overdue, and make the C6 feel dated right from the moment you first turn it on.

Web: www.nokia.com
Price: £250 SIM-free

Essential verdict
Performance: 6/10
Design: 7/10
Features: 6/10
Value for Money: 6/10
Overall score: 5/10

Written by Sandra Vogel. Originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine.

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