back to article Nokia X6 Comes With Music

Nokia's X6 smartphone is more than just another touch screen smartphone in an overcrowded market. In its 32GB form, this well-spec'd music phone will only be available with Nokia's Comes With Music package. It'll be hard to avoid, and is likely to benefit from aggressive subsidies. Nokia's X6: one of the few models currently …

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  1. Shakje

    I agree with most of it, and it's a good review, but

    "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."

    Last bit's right, coding them in .NET is no excuse for buggy code and I'm clearly missing a correlation. Also, take far more system resources than they should? Shouldn't really, and if they do, once again, it's down to bad coding.

    Other than that it's a good review, and pretty much what I expected.

    1. chuBb.
      Linux

      could always see if it would run under mono....

      although it would probably be more hassle than worth

  2. Sean Timarco Baggaley
    Thumb Up

    Agree with Shakje on .NET...

    ...but the Mono project does allow the back-end of the software to be ported fairly easily. Only the GUI would need to be rebuilt, but this would be necessary anyway. (Windows, OS X and Linux each have their own philosophies behind their GUI designs.)

    On the whole, it's sad to see Nokia consistently dropping the ball of late. I own a 2630 and I still think Nokia make very good low-end phones, but the margins on that sector are tiny. Nevertheless, Nokia really need to do something about their product and interface design processes. (Symbian is probably on its last legs; I can't see how the radical overhaul it needs is justifiable given the availability of Linux's multiple mobile platforms.)

  3. Lutin

    OVI

    All the OVI stuff is horrifically bloated and makes me cry when I use it.

    Also there's no excuse really for not charging through usb (in this day and age!).

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    S60 is not Symbian!

    Please please stop blaming Symbian for S60 El Reg. You keep doing it on all your Symbian Nokia Smartphone reviews. Symbian is the OS, written by Symbian and swallowed up by Nokia last year.

    S60 is Nokia's nasty out of date crappy GUI that they've shoehorned on top of the OS to make a god forsaken bastard child..

    "I got the impression that the phone team hadn't bust a gut to make this a must-have phone,"

    Unfortunately they are busting a gut - just in all the wrong places. Nokia strategy is all over the place. A combination of cluelessness, cost cutting and sheer Scandinavian stubbornness.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: S60 is not Symbian!

      True, S60 is not Symbian, but Symbian itself is not in much better shape than the bloated blob that is S60. The OS is just not scalable and, while it uses a bunch of nice tricks to provide stability and low memory usage, those are just not necessary now with modern dual core Cortex-A9s. Mobile phone CPUs are now so close to Atom processors in terms of performance and architecture that a modern monolithic OS with synchronous APIs and better support for multithreading (see the Linux kernel with whichever GUI you choose to put on top or the iPhone OS) is now the rational choice, and an old microkernel with cleanup stacks and exception support bolted on is not acceptable anymore.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      If you must complain then get it right...

      Finland is NOT in Scandinavia. Get it right!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    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.

    1. Tim Cook

      No.

      A phone that even it's most ardent defender describes as "sometimes" frustrating and buggy doesn't deserve even 70%. If anything, I think the Reg has a history of being a little too kind to phones like this - personally I wouldn't reward a phone that worked "quite surprisingly well", in this day and age I simply expect a phone to work well, and one that doesn't - or doesn't "sometimes" - just isn't good enough.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Comes with music..

    ..that doesn't include the stuff that you like listening to? Bonus.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Google Maps for Nokia S60 phones?

    I'd like to know where I could get it. When I tried visiting maps.google.com I was redirected to some crappy page attempting to detect where I was, and when I tried to get it from m.google.com I was told that my N97 can't run it.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Re: Google Maps for Nokia S60 phones? #

    Go to:

    m.google.com/maps

  9. Andy Watt
    Thumb Up

    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.

  10. Tim Cook

    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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