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Nokia X6 review

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Verdict

A powerful smartphone with all the features you need, but it's just too slow for us to recommend

Review Date: 5 Feb 2010

Reviewed By: Jonathan Bray

Price when reviewed: Free, on a £35.00 per month, 24 months contract.

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
4 stars out of 6

Performance
2 stars out of 6

Despite what the ads might have you believe, the Nokia X6 is neither the slimmest nor the most sexy smartphone around. It's quite thick, measuring 15mm from front to back, and its chunky, candy bar chassis is mostly constructed of cheap-feeling plastic.

But beneath the dubious construction, this is a highly capable smartphone. It's the first phone we've seen from Nokia to boast a capacitive touchscreen - which, by the way, crams an impressive 360 x 640 resolution into its medium-sized 3.2in diagonal.

It features a 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, GPS, an FM tuner, high-speed HSDPA data connectivity and Wi-Fi, plus a massive 32GB of storage.

The phone produces good-quality photos, music sounds great through the supplied headset, and it comes with a year's subscription to Nokia's music download service, which gives you unlimited downloads for as long as your data allocation allows.

The touchscreen makes typing using the on-screen keyboard surprisingly easy, and navigating around the phone's Symbian operating system - S60 fifth edition - is a reasonably straightforward process as a result.

The X6's battery life is right up there at the top of the tree too: it managed to retain an astonishing 90% after our 24-hour torture test. It's a highly capable all-round media phone.

But there are a couple of key areas where the X6 falls down, and the most crucial is performance. Nokia's web browser continues to let the side down, crashing during the Acid3 test and taking an average of 26 seconds to render the BBC homepage over Wi-Fi - that's way behind the iPhone 3GS and all the Android phones we've reviewed in the past.

The phone feels sluggish in general use too; as soon as you have more than one application running at the same time it slows to a crawl. And Nokia's Ovi application store simply can't compete with the best that the rest has to offer either.

There's no denying the Nokia X6 is a tempting offering. It comes with free music for a year, boasts great media playback, superb battery life, a good camera and a strong core specification.

But its performance - coupled with a pretty high price - means the X6 falls behind the best smartphones on the market.

Author: Jonathan Bray

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Comments

User comments

Expansion

I realise you're comparing this to the Iphone first and foremost which is not expandable, but would it not be worth mentioning that neither the 32GB nor 16GB version of this phone include a micro-sd slot?

Also, I consider it positive that the owner of a Symbian device is not restricted to downloading their software from a sole online store. If software isn't on the Ovi store, it can still be installed, unlike one of the other "best smartphones on the market."

If performance is a bad as you say, then that's certainly a major problem - it's slower than my 5800 at displaying the BBC (desktop) homepage (22sec), but I have the choice of installing a different browser on my Nokia, which cuts down the display time to 15 sec and also passes acid3. Your review of the 3GS doesn't mention how long it took.

By alynsparkes on 6 Feb 2010

It's also a phone

You don't mention how it fares as a phone. CNET reckons its audio performance when making calls is "tinny". [http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39030107,4930
4478,00.htm]
What say you? Also, my old Nokia 6500 has the Opera mobile browser pre-installed as an alternative to the Nokia browser. Does the X6? Finally, worth noting is that the 16Gb version is over £100 cheaper than the 32Gb version (see the nokia website), which skews the VFM factor considerably in its favour.

By ktillyer on 6 Feb 2010

James

What's the call quality like?

How good is it at picking up 3G singals in areas with poor reception?

Did you try the mobile version of Opera or Firefox?

How does it compare to the n900?

A lot of questions I know but for such a feature packed phone it is a very short review lacking in the detail a lot of PC PRO readers would like to see.

By JamesD29 on 8 Feb 2010

£299 (inc) for 16Gb

The price on the Nokia website for the 16Gb version places the phone in a different prce category to this review -at that price how many stars would it get?

By milliganp on 8 Feb 2010

Phone review please!

Yet another review of a PHONE where the phone's capabilites are ignored. Did the reviewer just sit there playing music all day? When will reviewers wake up and realise that we also need to know if a PHONE works well as a PHONE!! Otherwise this is a very expensive mp3 player, for sure.

By joebww on 11 Mar 2010

What about OVI suite?

You can't do much which is meaningful without the OVI support software -which is dire! Transferring data via the OVI suite takes forever (about 3 min per Mb). Syncing to my old phone which had about 2Gb of data took hours via OVI compare to 10 mins using usb disk mode.

By milliganp on 14 Jul 2010

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