Review: The Nokia X6. Let It Entertain You

Overview:

It looks as ice-cool as a Finnish swimming pool, and under the surface Nokia's new X6 aims to please as well with a slew of features and free access to Nokia’s Come With Music service. But just because the phone comes pre-loaded with a few Gavin and Stacey episodes, will it keep you entertained in the long run? Let's take a look.

Review:

Nokia has decided it was onto a good thing when it went from being a mobile phone manufacturer to a company producing entertainment devices. Well ok, that's not entirely true- its handsets do still call people and send texts. However the Finnish company is breaking the mould with its music and video offerings, and I for one am entertained.

The X6 is currently out in the UK for free on a plan around the £30 a month mark, which doesn't sound all that competitive until you realize that you get a year's worth of free music included.

We will focus on the 32GB phone in this review, though Nokia has also just released a 16GB version without the Comes With Music service and at a lower price.

Entertainment

The X6 includes Nokia's unlimited music download service Comes With Music as standard. The service allows albums and singles to be purchased, but with the X6 you get free range on the service for a year.

However, if you're on a 24 month plan as is pretty much standard, you will need to confirm with your network that your Comes With Music contract will be extended. You do get to keep the files you have already downloaded though.

The X6 will happily take on board around 7,000 songs, which can be easily downloaded from the intuitive music service.

The phone also has a built-in DJ which will choose your tunes for you based on the mood you select.

If that's not enough to get you started, the phone also comes pre-loaded with the entire third series of Gavin and Stacey, exclusively for Vodafone UK customers.

Style

The X6 is sleek.

I almost feel like I can leave this section at that sentence, but probably should elaborate a touch.

Nokia has gone minimalist with buttons on this phone as it has included a capacitive 3.2 inch touchscreen which we'll look at in the next section of this review.

The handset itself is tall and skinny like a cappuccino, measuring in at 111 x 51 x 13.8 mm.

The X6 feels a touch on the chunky side, which invites you to hunt around for a physical keyboard to slide out, but there is none to be had with all typing and navigation done on the touchscreen.

Keeping it sleek, the receive and end call buttons are the only ones on the front of the phone under the elongated screen, which brings us to the next section.

Screen

We've already mentioned that the touchscreen is capacitive, but what exactly does that mean?

Up until now, all of Nokia's touchscreen phones have had resistive screens, which requires a stylus for accurate selections. Not wanting to get too boffin on you, but resistive screens use two metallic layers which connect when you touch down on it.

Capacitive screens are glass coated with a transparent conductor. As your fingertips are also conductors, touching the surface will distort the electrostatic field and choose the next song you want to listen to.

This means you have more accuracy and speed with finger typing and can perform intuitive moves such as pinching the screen with two fingers to reduce the image.

While these options are made available on a capacitive touchscreen, Nokia still hasn't taken the plunge into pinch-to-zoom which is a shame really. Instead, the zoom function can be activated by double-tapping the screen.

Science lesson aside, the 3.2 inch screen displays at 360 x 640 pixels which makes for some bright viewing.

Camera

The 5 megapixel camera on the X6 takes sharp clear pictures, thanks to its autofocus.

It also boasts a nifty Carl Zeiss lens, dual LED flash and 4X digital zoom.

In low light however, the camera did struggle a bit, churning out some fuzzy images, which is a shame as the specs are impressive enough to combat this.

The video mode worked a treat though, producing 640 x 480 movies at 30 frames per second, and the TV-out connection allows you to instantly share your Spielberg masterpiece with the family.

Features

Being an entertainment device, the X6 comes with Nokia's Ovi store which allows you to download apps and games for when you get through Gavin and Stacey.

To compensate for making you sit on the couch watching sit coms, the X6 is also Ovi Map compatible, providing you with free walk and drive navigation, as well as Lonely Planet and Michelin trip guides.

The handset comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack as well, so thankfully, no proprietary headphones are needed.

It also features an FM radio, podcast client and can read Microsoft Office documents that may get sent through on your email.

Under the Bonnet

Connectivity-wise, the X6 comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G and a microUSB port.

It uses an ARM 11 434 MHz processor, which does the job of quickly handling all of the phone's apps and entertainment features.

The battery will last for 17 days on standby time which is great, but with the slew of features on this phone, it probably won't be left lying on your bedside table for that long.

One downside is that the 32GB of memory is it, with no external memory slot. Still, it's not a bad amount to be given and as previously mentioned, does hold 7,000 songs still.

The Gaj-It Verdict:

Design: 9/10
Usability: 7/10
Features: 8/10
Value: 8/10

We Say:

There's a lot to like with the X6 and this phone will keep you interested when other phones won't. Nokia still have a bit of a way to go though in fully utilising the capacitive touchscreen, but as a first attempt in this area, it has produced some sharp images and, let's face it, this phone is all about the music anyway.