The slide lock on the right hand side needs to be operated firmly, and since it's in the middle of the phone, the most likely operator is your middle finger. I can’t understand why Nokia can’t combine the Lock with the Power key (as with the iPhone) or place it more conveniently, where it falls naturally under your strongest digits (your thumb or forefinger). Samsung takes the latter approach. Both lock and menu keys are used several times a day, any issues here are magnified.
A music device first, second and third, but will Comes With Music be a sufficient draw?
Despite the bulky appearance – some promo shots suggest it’s far thicker than it turns out to be, the X6 is doesn't burst a hole in your pocketat 122g, unlike the N900. Panning out at 111mm x 51mm x 14mm, a shade lighter than the HTC Hero. The screen is better than the bodged S60 UI makes it appear – the Android with far fewer pixels (480 x 320 versus Nokia’s 640 x 360 pixels) appears clearer and sharper.
Battery life proved to be excellent. Nokia claims 6 hours talktime on 3G from the 1320mAh battery; and 35 hours playback. Disappointingly this doesn’t charge from the micro USB with which Nokia advises you to connect to your PC or Mac. The HTC Hero claims a better talktime, but in practice I got nothing like that from my power-guzzling HTC, and felt far more confident of the X6.
The X6 boasts stereo speakers, and a standard compliment of WLAN, and HSDPA radio. There’s an FM radio, but it still needs the headpiece connected as an antenna. With 600Mhz and 1Ghz chips in the latest gadgets, the 434MHz ARM is adequate, but no more.
The camera has autofocus and a harsh dual LED flash. It's nothing to be ashamed of: it offers perfectly acceptable shots outdoors and in decent light, it's only in dim lighting conditions that it struggles. Video records at up to 640 x 480 pixels and up to 30fps (TV quality), again, not earth shattering for a high-end phone, but respectable for a midrange beastie.
Featuring a Zeiss lens, the 5Mp camera performs reasonably well, except in low light
Nokia must optimise the Gallery, it's now too pokey and slow compared to the iPhone, showing the 21st Century equivalent of the hour glass as you scroll through pictures. Modern phones give people a pocket-sized picture frame, but Nokia is still obsessed with the idea that 'sharing' is primarily a web-based activity. It's not. Most photo sharing is simply showing a friend or relative a picture. The iPhone is flawless in this respect.
Next page: Sample Shots
COMMENTS
If you must complain then get it right...
Finland is NOT in Scandinavia. Get it right!
Few corrections...
Ovi Suite 2.0 is coded with Qt, and it is already available from Nokia website. Ovi Player is still based on .Net but that is about to change this year as all Ovi software will be ported to be based on Qt.
In case of other points about the phone, well, I have to disagree. I have the phone myself, have had for the last two months and I like it a lot. Yes, sometimes it is little frustrating to use, sometimes there are bugs here and there, but then again the phone works quite surprisingly well: my approx 10GB collection of music combined to Playlist DJ makes sure that I have always music playing on, with Opera Mini web surfing is no pain and mails come nicely to the e-mail application.
Giving the phone just 70% mark is in my opinion somewhat unfair, I would have given 80% because it does have the right kind of spec and it does deliver. It may not as smooth as iPhone, but then again it doesn't cost as much, comes with music and multi tasks. No offence, but this review hinted at least bias against Nokia and the S60.
S60
It's true, S60 has always been awful. At it's heart, it's simply a port of Nokia's most basic S40 menu style onto Symbian, that's exactly what it was at the beginning and exactly what the engineers and designers have been battling with ever since - all the more so now they've tried to make it touch friendly.
S60 isn't designed for touchscreens, it's designed for small screens and the most basic phone keypad and D-pad navigation ripped straight out of the nineties. The underlying Symbian is irrelevant to that, and always has been. The only reason S60 was ever respected as a "smartphone OS" was because it sold in high volumes - but almost universally to people who never even knew or cared that it was a smartphone OS. Those people were buying posh featurephones with good cameras etc, and a "user experience" that was as close to the most basic menu-driven Nokia that they could get in such a phone.
UIQ was far from perfect, but it was at least rooted in touchscreens, and a lot more forward thinking (at the time) about how people might actually want to use smartphones for their smartphone features.
Bit late on the S60 verdict aren't we?
A lot of those usability issues have been in every S60 phone since the year "."... I've hated the S60 UI since it was created (I was a UIQ man, although it had a lot of the same flaws in it regarding settings menus and lack of contextual UI cleverness) but I guess I can see that the sheer cack nature of it is cast into better focus by the current crop of smartphones.
Re: Google Maps for Nokia S60 phones? #
Go to:
m.google.com/maps
