Nokia X6 review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
In the world of Nokia it’s all about evolution, rather than revolution. So don’t expect the specs on the X6 to blow your mind. The handset is the next logical step for the market leader scrambling to make up for a late start in touchscreens. To be honest, the Symbian touchscreen OS has been struggling to catch up with the standard setters in terms of user experience. And the X6 claims to have the answer: the responsiveness only a capacitive screen can bring.
Nokia X6 price سعر نوكيا
Nokia X6 official photos
The Nokia X6 is also the first XpressMusic handset to head straight for the high-end. Midrange is the highest the music Finns have gone so we are interested to see how this change of approach works. Nokia have always had a strong appeal to the masses, but pleasing the selected few is undoubtedly harder.
Key features:
- Quad-band GSM support
- Tri-band 3G with HSDPA support
- 3.2″ 16M-color TFT LCD 16:9 capacitive touchscreen (360 x 640 pixels)
- Symbian S60 5th edition UI
- ARM 11 434 MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM memory
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash
- VGA video recording at 30fps
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
- Built-in GPS receiver
- 32GB built-in storage
- FM radio with RDS
- Bluetooth and USB (standard microUSB connector) v2.0
- 3.5mm standard audio jack
- Very good audio quality
- Proximity sensor for screen auto turn-off
- Accelerometer sensor for automatic UI rotation and motion-based gaming
- Stereo speakers
- TV out
- “Comes with music” edition gives you a year of all-you-can-eat music subscription
- Landscape on-screen virtual QWERTY keyboard
- Ovi Maps 3.0 Touch
- Further Ovi and MySpace service integration (direct image and video uploads)
- Most regional retail packages include a set of the great Nokia WH-500 headphones
Main disadvantages:
- X6 is still quite pricey (around 500 euro at the time of writing)
- UI is still immature with somewhat inconsistent user experience
- Touch web browser not quite polished and with dodgy Flash support
- No voice-guided navigation license
- No office document viewer preinstalled
- Doesn’t charge off microUSB
- Very poor sunlight legibility
- Slow image gallery
- No DivX/XviD support for the video player
- No microSD card slot (as a connectivity solution)
As you can see in the two lists above there is almost nothing new in the software package, so it all falls on the hardware to justify the high asking price. The well-stuffed retail package is a great place to start but does the capacitive screen improve usability enough to be worth the extra money over, say, the 5800 XpressMusic? And the difference in price is by no means trivial.
Nokia X6 price سعر نوكيا
Nokia X6 at ours
In the increasingly competitive touchscreen market manufacturers don’t have much room for error. The unpolished S60 UI is enough of a burden already, so Nokia X6 has to be near perfect in every other respect. A tall task indeed, but let’s see how they’ve tackled it.
Nicely geared retail package
The retail box of the Nokia X6 really manages to sweeten the whole deal. It doesn’t have too many items inside but the Nokia WH-500 headset is a real gem. At the price of an entry-level Nokia phone on its own, the stereo headphones are the kind of accessory music lovers will be delighted to get.
Nokia X6 price سعر نوكيا
Nokia X6 retail package
The WH-500 headset isn’t of course the best piece of audio equipment money can buy but it gets near enough so most people won’t even see (or rather hear) the difference. The audio experience is miles away from the one you get from the regular headphones Nokia usually include in their retail packages. And as a small bonus, the remote on the cord is also nicely designed.
Nokia X6 price سعر نوكيا
The WH-500 headphones
Nokia must’ve thought (and quite reasonably) there’s no way users will need a different headset, so they designed the whole thing together rather than using a detachable remote on the headphones.
Bear in mind though that Nokia chose to ship the X6 without a replacement in-ear set instead of the WH-500 headphones in some markets so you’d better check out the package contents before handing out the money. We don’t say you shouldn’t get the phone without them, we simply mean you should only do so if the price is adequately lower.
The other things that you will find in the box are a charger and a microUSB data cable. Luckily this time, Nokia included a regular cable rather than the extra short thingies they’re so keen on shipping with their midrange phones.
A small booklet with the key you will need for enabling your Comes with Music service is also included. Finally, there’s the usual CD and quick user guide that we suspect 95 percent of the users never get around to even unpacking.
Focusing on the capacitive touchscreen
The Nokia X6 centerpiece is, of course, its 3.2″ 16M color touchscreen display with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. Its size is about average for a pocketable touchscreen device and so is the resolution. We have seen plenty of WVGA displays recently which sport quite a lot more pixels so we can hardly consider it too great of an achievement. Yet with the HVGA still being quite popular we wouldn’t go as far as calling outdated either.
The capacitive display is the handset’s main feature
The main novelty that the Nokia X6 display brings (at least to the Nokia portfolio anyway) is capacitive technology. It only requires a very gentle touch, rather than a push for a click to be registered. The downside is it’s impossible to use with gloves, styluses or (for the ladies) long nails.
We made a simple test to check the accuracy of the Nokia X6 display by drawing straight lines on it. Any bumpiness on them would indicate hardware inaccuracies of the screen but luckily there were almost none to be seen. In this regard it ranks very near to the top of the capacitive pyramid, almost rivaling the resistive screens accuracy.
Unfortunately, the underlying hardware is not powerful enough to make the best use of the increased responsiveness. While the improved sensitivity is visible in simple menus where the phone doesn’t have a lot of calculations to make, in most cases it is simply nullified by the laggy software.
It’s a good thing that Nokia try to move forward with this one, but the improvement has to be on more than one level for the user experience to change. As things stand now, there will be more people missing the stylus input option and handwriting capabilities than those that will appreciate the increased screen responsiveness.
Another bad thing about the Nokia X6 screen is its poor legibility under direct sunlight. As a matter of fact this is the worst display in terms of sunlight legibility that Nokia have produced in years. The Nokia 5800, 5230 and 5530 trio wasn’t great but the X6 is the worse of all those.
