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Pros
- Capacitive touch screen.
- Good call quality.
- Good video recording.
- 16GB internal memory.
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Cons
- Oddly skinny screen.
- Awkward virtual keyboards.
- Overall middling performance.
Nokia X6 (Unlocked) Specs
802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
Bands: | 1800 |
Bands: | 1900 |
Bands: | 2100 |
Bands: | 850 |
Bands: | 900 |
Battery Life (As Tested): | 5 hours 29 minutes |
Bluetooth: | Yes |
Camera Flash: | No |
Camera: | Yes |
Form Factor: | Candy Bar |
High-Speed Data: | EDGE |
High-Speed Data: | GPRS |
High-Speed Data: | HSDPA |
High-Speed Data: | UMTS |
Megapixels: | 5 MP |
Operating System as Tested: | Symbian OS |
Phone Capability / Network: | GSM |
Phone Capability / Network: | UMTS |
Physical Keyboard: | No |
Processor Speed: | 434 MHz |
Screen Details: | 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen |
Screen Details: | 640-by-360 |
Screen Size: | 3.2 inches |
Service Provider: | AT&T |
Service Provider: | T-Mobile |
Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 16 GB |
Nokia's first capacitive touch-screen phone, the Nokia X6 is a great upgrade for folks who loved the
Physical Design and Phone Capabilities
In the mobile phone business, we call bar-shaped phones "candy bars," and the X6 is shaped more like a candy-bar than most. It's long and skinny, at 4.37 by 2 by .54 inches and 4.3 ounces, with pick-up and hang-up buttons below the tall, narrow touch screen.
I'm not a fan of the X6's skinny, awkward 640-by-360-pixel screen. Almost no content is designed for this aspect ratio. When you play videos formatted for most other devices, they're letterboxed. Reading Web pages feels either too wide and shallow, or too narrow and deep. And entering text is unappealing with the landscape and portrait virtual keyboards, both of which take over the whole screen so you can't see the field you're entering the text into.
Symbian Features
The X6 is a standard Symbian S60 touch screen phone, much like the Nokia N97 mini. That gives it a range of reliable smartphone capabilities, such as a good WebKit Web browser, connections to Microsoft Exchange and most other popular e-mail services, and access to Nokia's Ovi Store for apps. The 434 MHz ARM11 processor is slower than other smartphones' chips, but S60 doesn't have the visual flourishes that would require high-end power anyway.
Other key apps and features on here include
Symbian S60 wasn't designed for touch screens, and the interface feels grafted-on rather than custom-built. Nokia will only be able to solve this problem later this year, when they upgrade to the new Symbian^3 version. For now I'm willing to cut Symbian a lot more slack on non-touchscreen phones like the formidable
Multimedia and Conclusions
The X6 is a middling media phone. The phone packs 16GB of internal memory, although it has no memory card slot. You load and sync it using a stubby little MicroUSB cable and your choice of software—either Windows Media Player, Nokia's Ovi Suite, or mass storage drag-and-drop. Files transferred relatively slowly, and sometimes Mass Storage support vanished mid-transfer, requiring a reboot.
The phone has a 3.5mm headset jack, and comes with a decent pair of earbuds with a remote control on the wire. You can also use Bluetooth headphones. But that long, narrow screen means most videos will be either stretched or letterboxed, and while the X6 supports MP4 and WMV video, H.264 is out, so it can't take iPod-formatted files. The music player works decently, though it forces you to manually update its library whenever you want to add songs.
The X6's 5-megapixel, autofocus camera takes sharp, clear pictures, as long as you can hold it still. The persistently low shutter speeds meant I got a lot of blurry shots, especially in low light. The video mode took good-looking 640-by-352 videos at 30 frames per second.
In the U.K., the X6 is available for free with contract. Here in the U.S., it's $455—a fine price for an unlocked smartphone, but not low enough to get over the burden of not being subsidized by a carrier. If I squint, I can see a world where the X6 succeeds. It's a world where people are comfortable using Symbian, where Nokia smartphones are frequently subsidized by wireless carriers, and where the X6 is a classy upgrade to a best-seller. That world is Europe. The X6 is a decent phone, but it's not going to win Americans over to a fresh platform. U.S. touch screen smartphone buyers would be better-served with a
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 5 hours 29 Minutes
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