Nokia recently kindly lent me a new Nokia X6 touch phone. As anyone that reads this site often will know, I am a bit of a Sony Ericsson fan, so to be honest I was a bit doubtful that I would enjoy using it. How I was wrong.
The X6 is part of Nokia’s new “Comes with Music” range, this essentially means you can download as much music as you like for free, for the duration of your phone contract (12,18, or 24 months) from the Nokia Ovi Music Store. You can store it to your phone or PC, and then keep the tracks for life legally ! I tried it out and the stores choice is pretty vast (4 million + songs), tracks are not very compressed too (approx 8Mb per song). The phone also comes with Ovi maps which is a brilliant customised aGPS navigation system from Nokia with free map updates for life.
The basic specs of the phone are as follows:
- 3.2 inch scratch resistant glass TFT capacitive touchscreen
- 3G HSDPA 3.6 Mbps, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
- 5 MP Carl Zeiss optics camera with autofocus, Dual LED flash, and a video light
- 32GB storage built in,
- Symbian S60 software
- Very good battery life, 35 hours music playback (up to 420 hours in standby)
- 3.5 mm Nokia AV connector for audio and TV-out
- Ovi app store, Ovi Music store, Ovi Maps,
My take on the X6 is basically that if your in the market for the a Symbian type touch phone (i.e. not an iPhone or Google Android handset) then this is pretty much the best you can get right now. The touch screen uses the same tech behind the iPhone so when you touch it, it works. Having unlimited music is crazy good, downloads and sign up are easy, and the quality of the tracks is great. Free updated navigation maps for life is also a great plus, its the only navigation map that actually has my street address listed !.
A couple more things I must commend Nokia on is the slider on the side of the X6 that unlocks the screen, its such a easy solution and I found it worked much better/quicker than pressing a button and sliding a finger across the screen (the norm on other touch devices). It was also great to have a touch phone that had a battery life longer than 2 minutes, I ended up charging the phone every 3 days with 
normal use.
The Ovi store still has a little way to go till its as good as the Android market place or Apple app store, but ,most commonly used apps are present and accounted for.
Sound from the phone is good, the X6 also comes bundled with the best headphones I have ever seen/tried from a mobile phone company (see pick to the left).
Overall I’m impressed with this phone, it’s the first Nokia phone I enjoyed using. Keep an eye out for the upcoming Nokia N8 that’s due for release in Q3 this year, the phone looks similar to the X6 but will be the first phone to use Symbian^3.
To watch a clip of the phone in action see the YouTube video below.
P.S. I was going to compare this handset to the new Sony Ericsson X10 I have also been using, but don’t think its really right as they are in 2 different categories in my opinion. (Full smart phone is X10 and entry smart phone is X6). I also have yet to try the SE Vivaz, also a Symbian S60 touch phone, however since Nokia is part owner of Symbian I would be surprised if any other company could get more out of the Operating system.
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