Nokia C6

NOKIA C6 REVIEW

The Nokia C6 is the latest in a long line of modestly priced touchscreen smartphones with side-sliding keyboards from the Finnish company. Nokia doesnt have a particularly good track record when it comes to touchscreen smartphones. The Nokia C6 is a S60 5th Edition mobile computer with a large 3.2", bright nHD TFT color touch screen display, qwerty keyboard, 5 mega pixel Auto Focus with LED flash camera, A-GPS, and WLAN or HSDPA (3.5G). Optimizing the home screen to bring useful and relevant content right to the top is one of the yardsticks of a good user interface. On the C6, which is based on the S60 5th Edition platform, there are six placeholders where you can run a gamut of applications and shortcuts. These include time, date, phone profiles, favorite contacts, email headers and application launchers. While it seems like theres a lot going on here, the most useful (and practical) are the ones that let you jump to a program without having to trawl through several layers of menu pages. The visuals look dated because they havent changed much since the N97. Ticker tape-style mini apps like the ones for Facebook and AP Mobile display too little information to be of use. The same can be said for email headers on the home screen. It gets worse with the single- and double-tap annoyances. This input method was introduced to maintain compatibility with existing S60 3.x applications. The first tap lets you select, while the subsequent tap executes the command. The user experience here can range from confusion to frustration depending on your tolerance. Given that many competing touchscreen devices offer fluid and logical user interfaces, were inclined to think the latter. Symbian^3 is supposed to address many of these issues and it cant come soon enough. What we also didnt like were menu options in certain applications which took up precious screen estate and the confusing contextual commands. The latter was especially evident in Ovi Maps. For the rest of the people, the Nokia C6 is neither innovative nor evolutionary device. It doesn’t try to be best at anything, nor pretend something it’s not. The absence of extra perks is understandable for it’s price limit. But if you’re simply on a lookout for a capable and affordable device with one of the best physical qwerty keys out there, the C6 is hard bargain to match.

SPECIFICATION & FEATURES

NOKIA C6 PRICE

Price in USA $260

Price in UK £153

Price in EURO €177

Price in PAK Rs.21,000

Price in INDIA Rs.9,999