Guess what folks, yet another Nokia handset made it to my office today and it’s none other than Nokia’s first capacitive touchscreen phone - the X6.
For all you unboxing fans I’ve got some bad news: the device came out of the box with no accessories and such. So you have to bear with me here as we skip the unboxing part and go straight to the first impressions.
Note that I’ve received the 16GB version of the X6 in black color, no yellow/blue/red stripes, nothing. Pure black (except for 2 dark grey stripes on each side which are barely visible). It looks mean.
This is in conjunction with a recent announcement/event for the Middle East that took place in my homeland Lebanon, during which Nokia publicized the launching of the “Comes With Music” service starting in the region, early March.
The X6 and I had two previous encounters; 1 in September 2009 in Germany (I played around with a white/blue variant) and a second during last week’s event in Lebanon. I wasn’t sure I liked it back then, I felt it was too plain, but I was not able to take my time to give a decent test-drive.
Now that I have the X6 right here with me, here are my first thoughts:
- The device is relatively slim. I like its feel in my hand.
- The black color is amazing, the grey is barely visible.
- It feels very solid, a good start for the Xseries. Definitely beats the XpressMusic lineup in terms of build quality.
- The speakers on the left side are freakin’ huge.
- The lock/unlock button is on the right side but feels a bit loose.
- The device as a whole looks very classy unlike the XpressMusic predecessors that felt a bit funkier.
- The camera lens on the back has no cover but makes the back look good.
- The send/end keys are not touch-sensitive. They are hard keys along with the menu button. Good choice, that’s one of the aspects I liked in 5800XM better than 5530XM.
After firing it up, here’s how I see it:
- The screen is surprisingly sensitive. It’s capacitive, meaning only reacts to your skin; no styluses or anything else can be used.
- The UI is swift. Some nice changes inside menus will be covered in later posts.
- Vibration is strong.
- The lock/unlock key works flawlessly (can’t say the same for my N97 and N97 mini). The phone vibrates twice when unlocked and once when locked.
- The speakers are loud. Like.very.loud. Louder than the 5800XM, but I haven’t put them head to head yet. That’s based on an assumption and my familiarity with the 5800XM.
I am not going to elaborate more here since details are coming in the next 2 posts. I take the X6 to be the successor of the 5800XM and I can quickly affirm it does a much better job than the 1+ year-old party box, and that’s coming from a guy who has only spent a couple of hours with the X6. Things will look clearer to you once the handsets engage in a friendly fight in the upcoming post. As a final verdict and a first single impression, the X6 would really make me want to give a full touchscreen handset with no physical keyboard another shot. It seriously changed my mind and made me consider it as a potential (next) primary device. It sits up there with other candidates such as the N97 mini and the E72 (while keeping an eye on the N900 depending on new FW updates). While physical keyboards play in favor of the last 2 device, the “Comes With Music” service will definitely tip the balance in favor of the X6, and if it will tie me exclusively to this handset then I have to make sure I can live with it first. So far, things are looking good. More to come very shortly.
Comments are open and so are request. On your right, you can subscribe to feeds or follow me on Twitter where I’m active almost all day, every day. Help me out in choosing what to test and abuse during the reviewing process in case there’s anything I’m not taking into consideration. Stay tuned.
7 comments: