Review : Nokia X6 : Going up the ladder

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.

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. 

Design and construction

The Nokia X6 looks pretty nice with its opaque plastic finish. You can't be too imaginative when designing a full-touch handset but a huge display up front always has a positive impact on a handset's look.

Nokia X6 next to the 5800 XpressMusic

User interface is the same, despite the new touchscreen

As far as touchscreens go, the Nokia X6 is a first for Nokia -it's their first capacitive touchscreen phone. The S60 5th edition hoever hasn't changed at all. So, by now you should have seen plenty touch Symbian OS reviews and nothing here should come as a big surprise.

New touch technology, old software

 The first thing to note is kinetic scrolling which, in fact, works quite well and is available almost throughout the user interface - from file browser through gallery to contacts (and even web browser, though with quite spotty implementation). Unfortunately, it won't work in icon menus, like the main menu.
In those icon-centric menus you push the selection to the edge of the screen, which will scroll things in the opposite direction. It's very unintuitive and confusing, since everything else works the other way around. You can use the scroll bar for icon menus, but scrollbars are so 1990s.
Still, the good news is that finger scrolling has been improved everywhere as far as lists of items are concerned. You can scroll with the same ease as with the Apple iPhone - you push it one way and it moves in the oppsite direction as if you are pushing the actual list off the screen.
On the homescreen, the Contacts bar is side-scrollable and thus accommodates a lot more phonebook shortcuts.
Turning the handset landscape in text-input mode automatically brings a full QWERTY keypad up on the screen. Of course, there's still a long way to go. We'd still have to wait for auto-rotation of the homescreen, smart dial and a more elaborate Active Standby - with room for the WLAN scanner plugin, for instance.
Widgets are NSeries stuff so don't expect any of those here. And if you were expecting thumb-scrollable multiple homescreen panes, then you are out of luck as well, despite the fact that the touchscreen competition has had these for a long time.
S60 5th is in essence a direct translation of D-pad and soft-key action into touch. Although it has its benefits, the result is hardly the most fluent and intuitive touchscreen interface there is. Scrolling and accessing items across the interface is nothing like other touch platforms we've tried. On the other hand, soft-keys work just fine and enhance usability compared to other touch phones.
So, the user experience with S60 5th is a mixed bag and what you think of it will entirely depend on your background. If you know your way around S60, you'll be quite at home with the X6 interface. But if you come from an alternative touchscreen platform you'll find yourself climbing a fairly steep learning curve.
Opening an item in any of the listed submenus requires not one, but two presses - one to select, and another one to confirm the action. Now that's something that you don't normally see in other touch phones. You get used to it with time, but the main issue here is that the interface logic is different when you deal with icons instead of lists.When the opened menu uses icons to represent items as opposed to lists, then a single click usually does the job.
The scrolling as described earlier is equally confusing due to the two contradictory approaches. At least kinetic scrolling will make you feel way more comfortable than those first 5800 XpressMusic users. Plus, it does at least show Nokia are serious about polishing the Symbian touch platform.
Homescreen and main menu
The main menu structure leaves no doubt you're on Symbian turf. Icons are set in a 3 x 4 grid or a list and you can freely reorder. Screen orientation can be set to change automatically thanks to the accelerometer.
The homescreen, however, is one spot where auto-rotation is badly missed as the extra screen estate would've made it much more usable. For one, more shortcuts would've been visible on the Contacts bar. It's scrollable anyway - that's true - but if the 5730 XpressMusic can do it, why can't the touchscreen version?
Otherwise, the homescreen layout of the X6 is typical Symbian and looks exactly the same as it did on the Nokia 5530.
A single press on the clock starts the clock application (with an option for setting up an alarm) while tapping on the date opens a drop-down menu where you can either launch the calendar application or change the currently active profile, which does make using the the Power key for that purpose redundant.

Calendar, profiles and clock just a touch away

 You can also access the connectivity menu from here by tapping around the battery status indicator, which is the quickest way to initiate a WLAN search. It is not quite as quick as the 3rd edition plug-in where you only needed a single click for that purpose but it is better than nothing.
The Contacts bar follows right beneath: each contact is represented by the contact photo and their first name - and it's possible to have three contacts displayed at a time but the list is scrollable left or right.
For each contact you can add an RSS feed, so we guess it is a nice trick to add a contact that isn't a person just so that you'll have quick access to your favorite feeds on the homescreen.
Selecting a contact from the Contact bar brings up a screen with info on the contact (different from you get if you select the contact from the Contacts list). It has the contact photo, name and phone number. Underneath are four buttons - call, send message, update feed and settings.
Further down is an area that shows the communication history for that contact - both calls and messages. And finally, at the bottom there are the top two lines from an RSS feed.

Final words

A first capacitive screen for Nokia and a first truly high-end device in the XpressMusic lineup, the X6 is a smartphone that requires attention. It's good that Nokia do try and improve their touchscreens and respond to users' demands.
Yet we don't think the screen sensitivity is the main problem of the Nokia touch phones. Resistive screens have strengths of their own (better accuracy, stylus use and handwriting, etc.) over capacitive ones, so it's more about picking your priorities rather than ranking the two technologies.
Don't get us wrong - we are pleased with Nokia for giving their users a choice. It's great that they are creating handsets for different customers, rather than relying on the one-size-fit-all approach. However, there are other issues that need more urgent attention and we believe Nokia should focus their efforts there.
That focus should be the software on their smartphones, of course. The S60 UI is neither user-friendly nor attractive enough to rival the best in class. The core functionality is all there but when we are talking about that much money, only covering the basics just doesn't cut it.
The Nokia X6 is an expensive device all right (around 500 euro), even if we discount the Comes With Music license and the great headphones. And at this price point the flaws are not easily forgiven. Competition in this segment is tough to start with, and the fact that there's too many affordable alternatives with comparable feature sets doesn't help either.