Strangely all this comes on a mini-sized CD. But a 350MB download then follows. Why not ship a normal sized CD? The Ovi suite, which is missing the useful video sync software, has some more drawbacks. Both Ovi applications are written in .NET, which ensures they're enormously buggy, take far more system resources than they should, and are not portable to Mac or Linux. Tales abound of lost data. While you can (and should) steer well clear of Ovi Suite, you will need the Player.
An attractive bundle, but struggles to deliver on its promise
Unfortunately, while this is well designed and functional, it's barely usable. As our earlier screen grab shows, the test system stalled, with all fans blowing after transferring fewer than 1,000 files.
Comes With Music requires a long PIN to be entered once. Again, the buggy .NET suite acted against the user when it didn't need to: dialogs would be hidden behind windows. A little confusingly, CWM uses the Nokia Store – an iTunes-alike service where songs and albums are purchased individually. But free CWM are described as purchases. Once you're up and running it's as good as it promises. There's a wide catalog available, you simply stock up and go.
My first X6 device found Nokia misfiring on all cylinders. Insufficient RAM, sign-up glitches, daft defaults, all marred the experience. Many of the performance issues vanished when an identical replacement showed up, with enough memory on the system drive. Transfers were smoother, too, yet there are still sufficient bugs in the Music Player to give the potential buyer second thoughts.
Verdict
As a stop gap UI, 5th Edition can't compete with the high end, but it performs adequately when compared to cheaper rivals. I got the impression that the phone team hadn't bust a gut to make this a must-have phone, assuming that the unique Comes With Music proposition would sell the device. The Music team thought something similar. The result, when compared with similar offerings, is more prickly than need be.
For example, I recently tried Orange's Monkey Music (a music store for Pay As You Go subscribers) where almost everything is slicker and easier – and the test device, a Samsung S5600, while lacking the X6's paper features, was simply nicer to use.
A strong package on paper, a few tweaks could make the X6 a respectable midrange contender, but Nokia badly needs to go to market with something smarter and more modern than Symbian S60. ®
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Nokia X6
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.
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