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 step for the market leader scrambling to make up for a late start in touch- screens. To be honest, the Symbian S60 touch edition 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.
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 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.
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