With a capacitive touchscreen and Comes With Music, our hopes were high for the Nokia X6 handset to be a nice mid-range phone which does the basics and does them well. Sadly, it doesn’t quite live up to our expectations, even preset as they were to middling.
What we like
The screen. The X6 is Nokia’s first capacitive touchscreen phone and a huge improvement compared to previous Nokia phones that used resistive screens. A flick of the screen and it responds – not a stylus in sight. The camera is pretty good; with a flash, 5 mega-pixels and that familiar Carl Zeiss lens.
Being able to use whatever cans we fancy is a must for a phone that’s so geared towards music playback, so we appreciate the standard 3.5mm headphone jack. We’re still in awe of the Comes with Music deal, digital rights managed or no. With a massive internal memory of 32GB, there’s plenty of room to store all that media too.
The email function is passable – it’s quick and easy to set up and you can easily see the latest email in your inbox on the home screen. Once it gets going, processing times and web browsing are pretty quick.
What we don’t like
There’s one word which repeatedly sprang to mind whilst we were testing the X6: scrappy. The chasis itself feels quite cheap, and it has quite a toy-ish look about it. You really want it to have a slide out keyboard – it certainly looks as though it’s hiding one – but it doesn’t; all typing is done onscreen (eventually, after a good search for the keyboard you’ll convince yourself is there somewhere).
Writing text messages and emails is quite a chore; to use a full screen Qwerty keyboard, the phone has to be landscape due to the size of the screen. To compose the message upright, you’re stuck with the keypad layout you may remember from the dark days before smart phones.
The home screen is not pleasing. For a relatively small screen, the icons are too big and immovable leaving it seeming cramped. Nothing seems to be quite where we want it to be – the layout of apps and options, although customisable to an extent, was not user friendly and we often found ourselves scanning through menus getting increasingly irate.
The X6 also seemed to be quite lethargic; opening applications and even unlocking the screen and keys was a frustratingly slow process. In reality all it takes is a matter of seconds, but as you grow less tolerant towards the handset every millisecond grates just a little bit more.
Conclusion
We’re just not inspired by the X6. While there is no one major flaw (although the hardware leaves plenty to be desired), there are so many little issues that the overall experience is irreversibly tainted.