Nokia C6 smartphone
Workshy workhorse?
Review Nokia's midrange C6 is effectively a budget version of last year's N97 but still manages to pack in a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, a 5Mp camera and A-GPS with turn-by-turn satnav as standard. Being the C6-00, it runs on the Symbian S60 5th Edition, unlike the C6-01 unveiled at Nokiaworld this month, which runs Symbian^3 and won’t hit the shelves before the end of the year.
Nokia's C6: the N97 reincarnate?
The C6-00 is a bit of a brick, at 113 x 53 x 17mm and 150g, largely due to the slide-out keyboard. At first glance it looks very similar to the N97, but with a cheaper, more plasticky feel. It doesn't do that angled screen thing either, as the keyboard merely slides straight out, which isn't as fancy, but that's no great loss. More worrying is that the top half of the phone sits a bit high on the bottom half, with the result that it feels a little wobbly when closed.
The keyboard is a good one, with 39 backlit keys made from tactile rubberised plastic. They're slightly raised in the middle, so they're easy to find under the thumbs, plus there's a large five-way navpad for navigation. There's a decent amount of travel and feedback in the keys too and my only gripe would be that there's room for more alternative key options for symbols and punctuation – ten keys have no alternate options at all, which seems like a waste.
The screen measures 3.2in and offers 640 x 360 resolution (nHD, as Nokia calls it) with 16.7 million colours. It looks beautifully sharp and colourful, but it's resistive rather than capacitive, which is never a preferable option. That said, it's reasonably sensitive, and not too frustrating to use.
Beneath it is a sliver of three hard buttons for call start and stop plus a menu button. The sides feature a volume rocker, screen lock switch, camera shutter and a MicroSD memory card slot hidden under a plastic grommet. As we've come to expect from Nokia, it comes with a memory card as standard, in this case 2GB.
Slide out keyboard, but no tilting screen
The power slot is on the bottom, while the top has a 3.5mm headphone jack and micro USB power/sync slot beneath a grommet. The back features the 5Mp camera lens and LED flash and, incidentally, there's a QVGA camera on the front for video calls.
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COMMENTS
'but social networking could have been better integrated'
Why on earth does a phone's ability to integrate with social networking sites 'out of the box' make a blind bit of difference to how you rate this phone?
Not all of us are sad enough/insecure enough to feel the need to share every minute detail of our day to day lives in real time, and Symbian as a mature OS is very, very well catered for by thousands of apps (just because they're not in the Ovi store doesn't mean they don't exist)
IPlayer app
Couldn't give a toss about I-Player, it is an excuse for the BBC to want you to have a TV Licence for your phone.
I am after a new phone and will consider this one, but I would be temped by the Motorola Milestone, if I can find it on a good deal.
X10 Mini Pro
Yeah, I already have this phone and the only niggle with it is that the screen can be a litle weird at times.
The keyboard on that is pretty good for its size. Personally I would go for android every time over symbian. Im not that impressed with Nokia any more
The last Nokia phone I had was the E70 - which was great, until they decided they couldnt be bothered to support it - which makes no sense to me whatsoever.
X10 mini pro...
..is the same price if you wanted an android alternative. Probably cheaper now that it's been out for a bit.
comparable features but smaller. Probably better IMO
iPlayer app
is available on Ovi for Symbian. At least for the Xpress 5800.
