Nokia X6 – Beauty is skin deep Review

While the phone is well built, stylish, and sports a decent 5MP camera, the combination of its dated and not-touch-friendly operating system along with the lack of RAM and CPU power makes it a slow and expensive performer compared to many other phones out there at equivalent or lower prices, such as some of the mid and low-end Android phones from Samsung, HTC, Motorola and LG.

Build Quality & Ergonomics

Featuring a bar form factor, the Nokia X6 has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen that’s surrounded by a think bezel. Below the screen lie the LED-lit call, menu, and disconnect buttons, while above it, is the device’s earpiece, and secondary video to the right. The left side of the phone features the SIM socket in the middle, while the right side features the volume rocker on top, the screen locker in the middle, and a dedicated camera button to the bottom. The top of the phone, built out of glossy plastic has the 3.5mm audio jack and charging socket in the center, with the microUSB port to the left, and the power button to the right. The bottom of the phone, also featuring glossy plastic, contains the microphone and an indentation to snap off the battery cover, which is built out of matte semi-metallic plastic. The battery cover has a space for the 5MP Carl Zeiss lens camera and dual LED flash on the top left.

Overall, the phone is built out of high quality materials and has a nice, hefty feel to it, which at 122g is not much of a weight in your pocket or palm. All the buttons provide nice feedback, with the camera button and volume rocker impressing us with their tactility. The SIM port flap is well disguised, and fits smoothly on the left side. While the glossy black plastic on the top of the phone, around the screen, and the bottom of the phone do take away from the overall metallic aesthetics of the device, the phone’s relatively sleek looks and apparent solid quality will certainly attract some attention.

The only visible flaw is the design of the back panel or removable battery cover, which though easy to snap off, is not as easy to put back, leaving the user to figure out which sides need to be squeezed to fit it back nicely. Even once all the locks are snapped back in place, the back panel of the phone is still not completely secure, with a little bit of play remaining on top, near the camera and USB port, giving it slightly flimsy feel every time you squeeze the device a bit. We’re sure the minor flaw wasn’t specific to the test unit, as we’ve experienced it on other X6 units in the wild.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]As for the display, the phone’s 360×640 resolution is quite sufficient for the size of screen, and the contrast and colour is quite good as well. The display’s sunlight legibility is also surprisingly good. The screen supposedly also comes with a screen guard affixed on it in the retail version, but our test unit did not feature it. Without it, while the screen did accumulate fingerprints a bit more easily, the overall smudge-levels barely obstructed the view. As for touch sensitivity and response, the phone certainly ranks higher than previous resistive screens like the 5800 XpressMusic, but, is not of top quality, a fact that’s especially noticeable with the Series 60’s double click to open interface. Precision of input is not bad, easily allowing you to place your cursor where you want while typing, or selecting links in browsers.

The phone’s accelerometer is quite annoying, and frequently switches the phone into landscape even when it is mostly aligned to the vertical. Note: auto-rotate only works when you tilt the phone to the left (landscape) and back to the centre (portrait). There is not right landscape orientation.

Interface

Featuring the Symbian Series 60 release 5 operating system, the Nokia X6 is currently the only capacitive touchscreen Nokia phone in the Indian market apart from the Nokia N8. While performance comparisons between the phones would be quite unfair, we can’t help but notice just how outdated a touch-interface the Series 60 devices sport when compared to the Symbian^3 operating system. Requiring you to double click/touch on nearly everything, and featuring no multi-touch input, one is left quite frustrated with the device until one comes to grip with it.

The phone’s home screen features four customizable shortcuts at the bottom, along with a contacts bar at the top, and an email notification bar below that, and the telephone and contacts buttons below the shortcuts. On the very top is the signal meter to the left, analog clock display to its right, with carrier and profile displayed to the clocks right, before a large gap that leads to the messages and missed notifications bar and battery meter to the right. Touching the clock tile takes you to the alarm and world clock menu, while you can click the profile display to switch profiles, also directly from the homescreen. When you touch the battery meter or notifications bar, you are presented detailed notifications with shortcuts to the message and call menus, as well as a shortcut to the connections manager.

Read on to know more about the phone’s interface and performance, as well as see its test scores…

You can change the homescreen theme from the contacts bar interface to the shortcuts bar interface, which puts a shortcut bar on top (replacing the contacts bar), and makes telephone and contacts buttons tiles instead of tab buttons. There is also a ‘basic’ homescreen theme, which sports only the telephone and contacts tiles, and nothing else.

The lack of customizability is apparent, with no more than four shortcuts allowed on the single homescreen, and the dialler and contacts tiles/buttons not replaceable by other functions.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]The phone’s phonebook and calendar interface is good, like all other Series 60 rel. 5 devices, and, like other S60 devices, it also has the same annoying click to type messaging function. The onscreen keyboard is responsive (QWERTY in landscape, and alphanumeric in portrait) and sufficiently well-laid out, but no predictive text input options exist to help make the job of touch-typing any easier.

A nice feature is the turning control provided by the accelerometer to silence calls and snooze calls by simply turning the phone.

The phone comes with a few bundled games and apps, including EA’s Spore (good fun even on the mobile) and Asphalt 4. The Ovi Store is currently doing very well as well, and we found lots of free (Nokia sponsored) games available to download, and tried out Medal of Honor, Need for Speed Undercover, and Tekken 6, but were disappointed with their graphics quality.

Browsing was not exceptionally easy and rather, quit a pain, with the native Symbian browser is just as difficult to use as it is on the N8, except that there’s no multi-touch input in this case, leaving you to double-touch to zoom. Of course, you could always download Opera Mini or other browsers for a better browsing interface, but there’s hope that Nokia will be refreshing the browser for all Series 60 phones soon.

Performance

Call
The phone gave excellent call clarity in Zone 1 and Zone 2, however, in areas of low signal strength, calls were dropped quite frequently. Handsfree clarity is sufficiently good but not remarkable, with decent volume output and negligible distortion. The loudspeaker also provides clear, non-distorted output, but the voice pickup sensitivity is not especially good, evident to the listener as reduced volume.

Audio
The bundled earphones/handsfree is good on calls, and not too bad for listening to music, but if your looking for super-crispy treble and good bass we’d suggest you buy a decent set elsewhere. The handsfree’s output is not bad, but lacks bass output. Loudspeaker volume is good with little or no distortion at maximum, however, the lack of bass is evident here as well.

Video
The phone’s 640×360 resolution is not very conventional, and you will have a hard time finding videos that match the native resolution easily. As for playback performance, videos played smoothly enough, with no pixelation or artefacts, with no colour banding evident on the 16 million colour screen.

Camera
The phone’s 5MP Carl Zeiss lens camera is quite decent, offering low noise and sharp pictures in bright light conditions. Low light photography as expected is relatively poor, with the dual LED flash providing surprisingly white-washed out images, and a lot of noise evident without it. Also strange is the fact that even when flash is set to off, the phone will flash a little light before taking the picture, no doubt useful for seeing the object you are photographing in the dark, but not if it can’t be turned off. Camera settings are good, with plenty of options to satisfy the amateur photographer.

Interface
The phone’s interface can’t be called speedy, but neither is it slow in most normal circumstances. If you run a couple or more third party apps in the background though, things will slow down visibly. One or two more apps, including the browser, and the phone was not able to run video, claiming insufficient memory. Not cool. We tried finding some graphics intensive games from the Ovi Store to run on it, but it looks like the Symbian Series 60 rel. 5 platform doesn’t offer many. Otherwise, the game ran medium-graphics games decently, but that’s hardly saying anything.

Battery
The phone’s battery perforamnce is mediocre, providing about 20 hours worth of charge with medium use of Wi-Fi, voice calls, and music peformance.

Verdict
While the phone is well built, stylish, and sports a decent 5MP camera, the combination of its dated and not-touch-friendly operating system along with the lack of RAM and CPU power makes it a slow and expensive performer compared to many other phones out there at equivalent or lower prices, such as Samsung, HTC, Motorola and LG’s low and mid-end Android devices.

Rating

Features: 6.5
Build Quality: 7
Performance: 6
Value for Money: 5.5
Overall: 6.5

Price (MRP): Rs. 18,449 [16GB version]

Read on to see how well the phone performed in our tests, with its test scores….

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Abhinav Lal

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