Review: Nokia X6

If you want to be well known as a maker of modern smartphones then you have to be prepared to embrace the touchscreen. Nokia is aware of that fact, and it has already put a few toes in the touchscreen water.

While its previous attempts have had their good points, we never really got over the feeling that Nokia was sticking touch capability on top of a user interface, Symbian S60, that was designed for physical buttons. When set against something like the iPhone, this immediately put Nokia at a disadvantage before anything else had been taken into account.

Nokias X6 doesn’t do much to shake us out of that opinion. It is a nice handset with some good features which include HSDPA, Wi-Fi and A-GPS, but its S60 core holds it back. We felt the irritation during use that sometimes you have to double tap items and at other times only a single tap is needed. You do get used to the idiosyncrasy, but it is annoying during the early learning curve.

We do like the fact that Nokia has finally found itself able to put a capacitive touchscreen in a handset, though. This makes a big difference to responsiveness, and when we tapped we were always sure our interaction was being registered. It was disappointing therefore to find ourselves waiting for the phone to respond once to our commands in certain, often simple tasks.

The 3.2 inch screen has a wide and thin aspect ratio (640 x 360 pixels), which makes it quite good for viewing video and looking at Web pages in wide mode – in theory. In fact for some odd reason when Web browsing in wide screen a vertical menu bar takes up something like a fifth of the screen space and you can’t close it down.

In tall mode the screen mitigates against easy text entry. In that mode you get just a phone style numeric T9 tappable keypad. You have to turn the phone in your hand to get a QWERTY keyboard. With this showing typing at speed is a lot easier.

There is a slide bar for zooming when looking at photos and Web pages, and you can double tap to zoom in Web pages too, the latter centered on where you tap, but there’s no multitouch which means no pinch to zoom or twist to rotate.

With 32GB of built in memory you might feel this handset is well featured for storage and be ready to take advantage of a bundled year’s worth of Comes With Music downloads (and the phone is now available in a 16GB without the CWM subscription as well).

But there is no flash memory card slot for adding more storage. The 3.5mm headset connector is a plus but Nokia’s provided headset is one-piece so you can’t easily have wired handsfree plus your favourite earphones. At least the provided headset has inline music controls. You can use the 3.5mm connector for TV-out but you’ll need to buy a lead.

The 5 megapixel camera benefits from a dual LED flash and the image quality was quite high, no doubt thanks to the Carl Zeiss optics. There are a fair few settings including a macro mode, sequence mode and sports modes, but no panorama mode which is a shame. There is a front camera for two way video calling.

You can get to the handset main menu by tapping a button between the Call and End buttons under the screen. If it is media you want, a small touch sensitive key above the screen calls up a menu for music, pictures, online sharing, video and the Web.

We really wanted to like the Nokia X6 but found this difficult. Simple things like a lack of a microSD card slot combined with more complex issues like an operating system that still feels like it has had touch bolted on and unimaginative use of wide screen mode in the Web browser simply aren’t up to scratch.

The X6 is clearly Nokia’s attempt at challenging the iPhone. The Comes With Music subscription adds some value in this respect, but otherwise the phone is more pretender than true contender.

Price (as reviewed): £449
Web: www.nokia.co.uk

Essential Verdict
Performance: 6/10
Design: 8/10
Features: 8/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 7/10

Review originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine. Written by Sandra Vogel.

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