Nokia C6 Review

Nokia a Finnish mobile giant has unleashed a new touchscreen Smartphone in the form of Nokia C6. It is the second member of the Nokia’s C series. The Nokia C6 looks like a trimmed version of N97. With inclusion of sliding qwerty keyboard, it will be liked by heavy texters. It features 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, resistive touchscreen, good battery, social networking, and 5 megapixel camera. Overall, it is an all rounder phone that priced that comes at affordable price.

Design

The design of the Nokia C6 is almost same as the and Nokia N97 mini and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. The build material “high quality material” is same as the Nokia N97. We found that the Nokia has wasted the most of the real estate on the front panel. It measures 113mm tall, 53 wide and 16.8mm thick. It weighs around 150g, quite heavy in hand. It is solid phone and offers better sturdy grip. It is available in White and Black colors.

The Nokia C6 sports a 3.2 inch resistive touchscreen, which has the resolution for 640×360 pixels and supports 16 million colors. The resistive touchscreen is acceptable for its range. Usually resistive touchscreens are not as snappy as capacitive touchscreens. However the C6 screen possesses decent sun legibility and the screen is bright, colorful and crisp. The touchscreen is equipped with many sensors: accelerometer for automatic UI rotate, light-ambient sensor and proximity sensor for autolock.

Just below the display, you will find three wide buttons: the call, menu button and end buttons. A small VGA camera is at the top of the screen. The camera lens along with an LED flash is present at the back of the mobile. A microUSB port and a 3.5mm audio port are present at the top of the phone. A microSD card slot is present on the left spine. A camera shutter key, a phone Lock/Unlock button and a volume rocker are present on the right spine. All the ports are covered by a plastic cover to avoid dust.

We are impressed with full backlit, slider qwerty keyboard. Heavy texters will love this feature. The keys are pretty tactile and responsive. The placement of keys could have been still better. It offers alphanumeric keyboard in portrait mode, qwerty onscreen keyboard in landscape and of course full physical qwerty keyboards.

Features

The Nokia C6 is running on the Symbian OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5. It is pretty much same as other Nokia Symbian phones. The Symbian has lost its sheen with the market is ruled by Android and other smartphones OS. However, the Symbian OS has done a good job her. The Menu system, Icons and interface is very nice.

Multimedia

The C6 comes with decent multimedia player. The interface is simple and convenient to use. It supports popular audio and video formats. You can download plenty of songs from Ovi Music. It also suggests the songs based upon your previous searches. The sound is excellent. It also features FM Radio with RDS feature.

The C6 has internal memory of 200MB. You can also store files in MicroSD card up to 16GB.

Connectivity & Internet

The connectivity features are more than adequate at its price range. You can avail data transfer through Bluetooth with A2DP and USB v2.0. You can stream audio to Bluetooth headset wirelessly. The internet can be accessed with the help of 3G (HSDPA, HSUPA), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, and GPRS. The data transfer speed is enhanced with the EDGE support.

The C6’s web browser is pretty decent as this supports full HTML and as well as WAP 2.0. The web browser supports Flash lite v3.1 and RSS feeder.

The Nokia C6 is nicely integrated with social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Hi5. It also supports Instant Messaging for Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. You can create and manage all your email accounts including Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other email accounts (SMTP, IMAP4, and POP3).

GPS & Applications

The Nokia C6 has preinstalled Ovi Map application. As we know, Nokia offers free subscription of Ovi Map app for life. Cool!! Isn’t it? The C6 has built in GPS receiver and A-GPS receivers. You will also get Nokia Maps loader app through PC. It will locate your position on the Map within matter of few minutes, thanks to A-GPS feature.

The other essential features include unit & currency Converter, Calendar, voice recorder, To-do list, Calculator, Note pad, a timer, a world clock, Flight mode, speaker phone, vibrate mode, Voice commands, text and multimedia messaging.

You can personalize the phone with themes, wallpapers, ringtones, message alerts, widgets, and screen savers. You can download all these from the Nokia’s Ovi Store. You will also get access to Ovi Suite and Ovi Share. You can also back up your contacts in Ovi Contacts. It also features few games and you have the option of downloading them from Ovi Store. You will have the access to other PC apps like Lotus Organizer, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Express, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft word & PowerPoint,   Microsoft Outlook Express and PDF reader.

You can print the documents easily and quickly with the help of  Nokia XPressPrint. It has sophisticated 1000 entry phonebook with a room for multiple contact entry and thumbnail photo.

Camera

The Nokia C6 is equipped with 5 megapixel camera that can take pictures at 2584×1938 pixels. The camera features Autofocus, integrated LED flash, 4x digital zoom, Geotagging images and basic editing options like Settings for scene, video light, white balance and colour tone. The C6 also features secondary camera at front in order to facilitate video calling. You can also capture videos at 30fps in 16:9 aspect ratio. You can share the photos and video to social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace and etc. You have the provision of storing photos in Ovi Share.

The image quality is quite good, but it falls short of 5MP camera standards. The images are crisp and vibrant, bit less bright. The video quality is also mediocre. The Carl Zeiss optical lens is not used here.

Performance

The Nokia C6 is powered by 1200mAh Lithium Ion battery. It has the rated battery life of 420 minutes of talk time, 400 hours of standby time and it keeps the phone alive for 246 minutes on continuous video playback. The battery life is impressive in this category.

The call quality is impressive with no distortion. Callers at both the end have no problem. The sound is clearer and louder. The speaker phone is also good.

The C6 runs on the 434MHz ARM 11 processor. It is slow compared other processors in smartphones. But it is sufficient for the C6 to carry out the functions without much delay.

Price

The best part of Nokia C6 is price. It is loaded with all the goodies and yet priced at Rs. 13,000.