We've been getting in depth with the Nokia X6 over the past few days, checking out its camera and sturdy build. But how does the software on board measure up? Can it match the powerful kit under the bonnet? Read on and find out in our review...
Unlike the Nokia N900, which runs Nokia's fantastic new Maemo 5 operating system, the Nokia X6 uses the tried and tested Symbian S60 5th edition. You'll recognise it from the Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97, though there are a few changes.
Check out our full Nokia X6 review
For starters, you don't get the same always on widgets sucking in data as you do on the N97 and N97 Mini on the homescreen. You still get email notifications in just the same way, but along with it, you get a clever contact bar. You can add up to 20 of your friends' contact cards into this row below the clock, and you can scroll through tiles of their portraits to find who you want to call quickly and easily.
Dialling and texting is easy. For numbers, you just tap the Telephone button, which sits on the bottom left soft key and pops the 0-9 keyboard. You can use this format to type out texts and emails too, but to pick up speed, you'll want to use the landscape keyboard, which is now very ease to use - more on that below.
Symbian S60 does a decent job of multitasking, and you can pull up the taskbar by holding down the central menu, but it is starting to show its age now overall. Tilting the Nokia X6 from landscape to portrait and back can cause a prolonged blackout. It's usually fairly snappy, but it's disheartening to see your phone go black for up to a few seconds before springing to life again re-oriented. There's also no auto-correction for typing in full QWERTY, which is a pity, as though it's the quickest mode for typing, it'd be even faster if it knew you meant to write "electric" instead of "electrac", or "my" instead of "mt". The browser also crashes on occasion, and after trying a Nokia N900, makes you pine for the Maemo browser or Firefox mobile.
But software's only half the battle of course - the other is how you interact with it, and Nokia's made a big change here with the Nokia X6. It uses capacitive touchscreen technology, which picks up finger prods more easily. We love it: it's incredibly responsive, and lets you type with your fingers with a landscape keyboard faster and more comfortably than we can with a stylus on a 5800. Having every push registered without wielding a stylus is a wonderful feeling, to the point of relief.
Since we posted our Nokia N900 review, we've seen some strong support for the resistive technology Nokia's used on its touchscreens up until now. If that's where your allegiance lies, the chances are, the Nokia X6 won't be up your street: the lack of stylus and borderline kid friendly big buttons will put you off (They also limit the window where you can see text being entered quite substantially). But for people who don't care about exact pixel accuracy or haven't even owned a Nokia before, it's a killer improvement.
Simply put, pulling the Nokia X6 out of your pocket and opening up what you want is quicker than trying the same with any other Nokia, bar the E71 and E72. That's kudos enough on its own, but factored with the Comes With Music buffet the Nokia X6 comes with, it makes it a very attractive proposition indeed.
Check out our Nokia X6 Review (Software and ease-of-use) image gallery:
