Nokia’s music-focused phones until now were carefully placed in the XpressMusic brand. The arrival of the company’s newly inducted X series at Nokia World 2009 only saw consumers shifting loyalty soon enough. The Nokia X3 and the X6 were proud to have been among the very first devices to show up in this portfolio. As Nokia swayed onto the touchscreen floor once again, the X6 in a 16GB version convinced us enough to put it under the scanner. Yes, the latter is what we’ve managed to lay hands on for a comprehensive review. Catching our attention almost instantly with its scorching new fabrication, read on to know whether it’s just an upscale from the Nokia 5800 which it is believed to have replaced or leagues ahead.
The Nokia X6 came to us in a box that was filled to the gills with accompaniments. What emerged from the carton other than the smiling X6 in a dapper black hue was a charger, a connectivity cable, a stereo headset, a car holder and charger, a battery mini DVD and a user guide. The handset adorns a candy bar form factor which most touchscreen phones bear these days. The glossy front reveals an overall cheap plastic build which may not appease enthusiastic mobile lovers who’ve spent a good enough time with touchscreen phones. The matte back fabrication though saved the day by making the phone more graspable and palm-friendly. There’s a 3.2†16 million colors touchscreen having a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels on the front face of the device. And it’s only a good thing Nokia moved over its fascination for resistive touch displays with this one.
Above the screen to the top right is a forward firing camera while seated neatly below it are 3 buttons for call, menu and call end. Don’t be deceived by the touch sensitive appearance of these knobs as they are very much physical in their functionality. Moving over to the right of phone, the chassis embeds a shortcut to the camera function, a well-planted convenient lock/unlock switch and the volume adjustment button traversing from the bottom to the top. The upper panel includes the microUSB connection covered by a cap, the 3.5mm audio jack, the charging connection and finally the power button. The left edge bears the SIM card slot complete with a flap and two speaker grilles. A five megapixel Carl Ziess optics snapper is what’s fitted at the back.
Considering it’s the first capacitive touchscreen handset to come from Nokia’s quarters, we were enticed to put the display first through its paces. And might we say the company’s done a good job with the display; high quality images and content was reflected all the way. Responsive through most part, the scratch resistant glass surface only works in favor of making it more user-friendly. While the 16:9 aspect ratio screen does tend to lose color when you’re in bright light, it’s nevertheless superior with indoor viewing. The Nokia X6 phone borrows the 5th edition of the Symbian S60 platform best known for its antics on the Nokia 5330 XpressMusic handset. The homescreen comes complete with the option of adding a new contact or setting up a new email account. Squinting our eyes closer to the display’s top right area revealed Nokia’s latest magic trick. There’s an intriguing touchscreen area which when nudged just slightly pops open a dropdown list for attributes like music, images, sharing and others.
Akin the latest Nokia touchscreen phones, the lower portion includes the Music Store, Messaging, Ovi Maps and Ovi Store shortcuts. The handset’s ‘Comes With Music’ heirloom saw us itching to see what the Music Store and Ovi Store had on offer. The latter, committed Nokia fans will know of being quite helpful with downloads and purchase of songs, games, movies and more. A year of free music downloads should get any music buff excited save for the fact that it’s not as intuitive as one would have liked it to be. The included Ovi Maps feature knew very well just what it’s been assigned from helping us know our current position to finding places and sharing a location. What’s more is it’s rounded off by voice guidance for driving or walking to a destination, all for your pleasure. The inbuilt 16GB memory we got onboard did nothing but put a smile up on our faces. Media content hoarders or not, it sure translated to a lot of data that could be packed onto the X6 phone.
The Menu key was what we hit next to only be thrown into a rather simplistic interface. We liked how the functions were spread into a 3 x 4 matrix making for a very organized phone experience. The built-in accelerometer also deserves mention at quickly transforming the screen from portrait to landscape modes and vice versa when required. We tried our hands at sending a text message and touchscreen just decided to play naughty with its responsiveness. So while the phone may not be a real messaging blower of sorts, it does allow accurate typing. With its clear objective at appeasing music lovers, the phone is plenary on the audio front. On-the-go music enthusiasts will find a Music Player, Radio, Podcasting, Recorder and Playlists besides the earlier mentioned Music Store. The audio playback is without doubt top-notch and the in-built speakers say Nokia’s audio wizardry is good with sound being uncannily precise and melodious. Playing videos shows up volume shortcuts on the left and play, pause, forward and next functions on the right edge of the screen for more control.
Interestingly internet access is seamless and the phone has nothing but good conduct to display on that front rounded off by 802.11 Wi-Fi support. The handset’s pretty normal touch however made navigation of websites a not so pleasant experience. The Applications Center looked like it had a black belt in entertainment. The expansive applications list included Games too and we couldn’t wait to get on the racing circuit in Asphalt 4. While the audio of the game plays up well, we couldn’t really say the same about the rendered graphics. The other titles featured in the game section were DJ Mix Tour and Spore. The included 5MP camera comes complete with autofocus and dual LED flash while also being capable of recording VGA videos at 30fps. The photographic capabilities of the handset see it scoring well in both still and video modes. With the entire multimedia prowess the phone offered, it was still modest enough to cough up a 2 days battery juice on medium usage.
There’s no denying that Nokia has been pretty much of a dawdler at booking a seat on the touch ride. Nevertheless, the Nokia X6 with an upscale from the resistive to capacitive type of touchscreen says the company has done a good job after all. Though the touchscreen had its moments at being a laggard, the phone offered us a nifty experience both with overall audio quality, connectivity and calls. The lack of better fabric with the phone’s build seems to take away from its multimedia prowess and massive storage capacity. We can’t really say if the attached price tag too does justice to the package and performance. At Rs.16,669 it seemed like a visible downer as there are lower priced alternatives in the market. We mark the phone at a neat 8.8 out of 10.
