NOKIA X6 (UNLOCKED)

first capacitive touch-screen phone, the Nokia X6 is a great upgrade for folks who loved the Nokia 5800 ($359.99). That may make it a smash in merry old England, but here in the U.S., almost nobody loved or even knew about the 5800. So, just like with the Nokia N97 mini ($479.99), the X6 becomes a strange orphan: a phone designed to play to the faithful in a country where there aren't actually any faithful.

Physical Design and Phone Capabilities
In the mobile phone business, we call bar-shaped phones "candy bars," and the X6 is shaped more like a candy-bar than most. It's long and skinny, at 4.37 by 2 by .54 inches and 4.3 ounces, with pick-up and hang-up buttons below the tall, narrow touch screen

I'm not a fan of the X6's skinny, awkward 640-by-360-pixel screen. Almost no content is designed for this aspect ratio. When you play videos formatted for most other devices, they're letterboxed. Reading Web pages feels either too wide and shallow, or too narrow and deep. And entering text is unappealing with the landscape and portrait virtual keyboards, both of which take over the whole screen so you can't see the field you're entering the text into.

The Nokia X6 is an unlocked phone. It connects to AT&T's 3G network or T-Mobile's 2G EDGE network here in the U.S., and to 3G networks abroad; it also supports Wi-Fi. Reception was acceptable, and voice quality through the earpiece was excellent—loud and clear. The speakerphone was also solid and of good volume. The phone's microphone transmits a bit more background noise than I'd like. The X6 made calls using Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99.00) and Plantronics Voyager Pro ($99.99) Bluetooth headsets without a problem. Voice dialing can be activated from a Bluetooth headset, but it had trouble recognizing my commands. Battery life was fine but not great at 5 hours, 29 minutes of talk time over 3G.

Symbian Features
The X6 is a standard Symbian S60 touch screen phone, much like the Nokia N97 mini. That gives it a range of reliable smartphone capabilities, such as a good WebKit Web browser, connections to Microsoft Exchange and most other popular e-mail services, and access to Nokia's Ovi Store for apps. The 434 MHz ARM11 processor is slower than other smartphones' chips, but S60 doesn't have the visual flourishes that would require high-end power anyway.

Other key apps and features on here include Ovi Maps (Free), which accurately identified my location but had trouble finding specific nearby businesses I was looking for, like a local bagel shop. There's also an FM radio, a podcast client, and Microsoft Office document-reading apps for your e-mail attachments.

Symbian S60 wasn't designed for touch screens, and the interface feels grafted-on rather than custom-built. Nokia will only be able to solve this problem later this year, when they upgrade to the new Symbian^3 version. For now I'm willing to cut Symbian a lot more slack on non-touchscreen phones like the formidable Nokia E72 ($359.00).

Multimedia and Conclusions
The X6 is a middling media phone. The phone packs 16GB of internal memory, although it has no memory card slot. You load and sync it using a stubby little MicroUSB cable and your choice of software—either Windows Media Player, Nokia's Ovi Suite, or mass storage drag-and-drop. Files transferred relatively slowly, and sometimes Mass Storage support vanished mid-transfer, requiring a reboot.

The phone has a 3.5mm headset jack, and comes with a decent pair of earbuds with a remote control on the wire. You can also use Bluetooth headphones. But that long, narrow screen means most videos will be either stretched or letterboxed, and while the X6 supports MP4 and WMV video, H.264 is out, so it can't take iPod-formatted files. The music player works decently, though it forces you to manually update its library whenever you want to add songs.

The X6's 5-megapixel, autofocus camera takes sharp, clear pictures, as long as you can hold it still. The persistently low shutter speeds meant I got a lot of blurry shots, especially in low light. The video mode took good-looking 640-by-352 videos at 30 frames per second.

In the U.K., the X6 is available for free with contract. Here in the U.S., it's $455—a fine price for an unlocked smartphone, but not low enough to get over the burden of not being subsidized by a carrier. If I squint, I can see a world where the X6 succeeds. It's a world where people are comfortable using Symbian, where Nokia smartphones are frequently subsidized by wireless carriers, and where the X6 is a classy upgrade to a best-seller. That world is Europe. The X6 is a decent phone, but it's not going to win Americans over to a fresh platform. U.S. touch screen smartphone buyers would be better-served with a Google Nexus One ($179.99-$529.99) or an Apple iPhone 3GS ($199.00-$299.00).

New Nokia X6 vs. Original Nokia X6

The new Nokia X6 will be marketed as the "Nokia X6 16GB". It'll not be a Comes With Music phone, but will offer free Ovi Maps out-of-box like all new Nokia smartphones moving forward. It'll also be available in four colors: All black, all white, white with pink highlights and white with yellow highlights.

The original Nokia X6 will continue to be sold as a Comes With Music phone in selected markets. The Nokia X6 16GB will be available worldwide in Q1 2010. A price has yet to be announced.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time : 5 hours 29 Minutes


NOKIA X6 FULL SPECIFICATION

GENERAL

2G Network – GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network – HSDPA 900 / 2100
Announced – 2009, September
Status – Coming soon. Exp. release 2009, 4Q

SIZE

Dimensions – 111 x 51 x 13.8 mm
Weight – 122 g

DISPLAY

Type – TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size - 360 x 640 pixels, 3.2 inches
Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
Handwriting recognition
Scratch-resistant glass surface

MEMORY

Phonebook – Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Detailed, max 30 days
Internal – 32GB storage, 128 MB RAM
Card slot – No

DATA

GPRS – Class 32
HSCSD- Yes
EDGE – Class 32
3G – HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
WLAN – Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
Bluetooth – Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port – No
USB – Yes, v2.0 microUSB

CAMERA

Primary – 5 MP, 2592×1944 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Dual LED flash, video light
Features – Geo-tagging
Video – Yes, VGA@30fps
Secondary – Yes, QCIF@15fps

FEATURES

OS – Symbian OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5
CPU – ARM 11 434 MHz processor
Messaging – SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser – WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
Radio – Stereo FM radio with RDS
Games – Spore, D Mix Tour, Asphalt4 + downloadable
Colors – Blue on White, Red on Black
GPS – Yes, with A-GPS support; Ovi Maps 3.0
Java – Yes, MIDP 2.0
WMV/RV/MP4/3GP video player
MP3/WMA/WAV/RA/AAC/M4A music player
TV-out
Voice command/dial
Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
T9
Photo editor

BATTERY

Standard battery, Li-Ion 1320 mAh (BL-5J)
Stand-by – Up to 401 h (2G) / 420 h (3G)
Talk time – Up to 8 h 30 min (2G) / 6 h (3G)
Music play – Up to 35 h