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Nokia has bundled its Navteq Maps purchase – since rebranded as Ovi Maps – for free for some time. Now it offers free turn-by-turn Navigation for drivers and pedestrians. It's still much harder to use than Google's Maps, which began the rush to offer free directions, but Nokia's offering caches the maps offline, and shows street numbers. Google's shows bus stops, however - and the killer integration of Street View into the Maps application itself. For all the fuss around Ovi, downloading Google Maps is one of the first things people will do with an X6.

Nokia X6

Storing up trouble? The unit doesn't default to store data on the 32GB drive

This review is a tale of two devices, and the performance couldn't be more different. They were both X6 phones, both had identical firmware, and the only difference was the amount of free space on the C:\ drive, namely a small partition separate from the whopping 32GB flash drive, largely devoted to system files. You may wonder why, 30 years after Bill Gates made MS-DOS bug compatible with CP/M, any device should have a 'C:\' drive. Let's put that to one side. The issue is why encumber the user with having to deal with two partitions? It could be completely transparent.

The first X6 that Nokia sent was very flakey, so much so that it couldn't adequately multitask. Trying to activate the camera when music was playing, and the phone flashed up the terrifying message: 'Deleting some items from memory' – imagine how that goes down with a new or nervous user – before dumping you out of both Music Player and Camera. The device had around 45MB left on C:\. The replacement X6, otherwise identical in every way, had 250MB free on C:\, and exhibited no such problems. Multitasking was much smoother.

The problem is that C:\ is the default for so much data: incoming files, downloads, mail attachments - they all fill up the tiny C:\ partition first, unless you manually intervene. So without a lot of TLC, phone number two is destined behave like phone number one in time.

Nokia ships an above-par WD-500 wired headset with the phone, which gives you track forward and back functionality. Which is just as well, as you need to unlock the phone to do this using the screen - a mind-boggling decision. As for the Player, it's changed little since the serviceable S60 3rd edition music client familiar to millions, seen on the N73 and N95 8GB Music Editions. There's no 'Now Playing' option, however, you may return to the home screen where the track, but not the artist, is displayed in a fairly small font.

Ovi Player stalled, maxing out the CPU at 100 per cent, performing a simple transfer

To take full advantage of Comes With Music, you're required to instal the Ovi Player. Nokia also smuggles in something called Ovi Suite, which is the already-notorious replacement for the Nokia PC Suite software.

If you must complain then get it right...

Finland is NOT in Scandinavia. Get it right!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Re: Google Maps for Nokia S60 phones? #

Go to:

m.google.com/maps

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