Nokia C6-01 Review

Introduction:

If you want to go touch screen phone, have used Symbian S60 your entire life and don't want the hassle of learning how to use a new OS, then Symbian^3 is the best Symbian iteration to date. Of the launch line of Symbian^3 phones, we've had a look at the N8, the mobile camera extraordinaire, the C7, a touch of elegance, and now it's the turn of the Nokia C6-01, the most affordable of the line with a smaller screen and a thicker form-factor. Despite being the lowest spec'd of the three phones, it still boasts some great functionality such as the same 8MP camera found on the Nokia C7 with twin LED flash and the same connectivity options. It is also the first handset we've tested to utilize Nokia's new CBD (Clear Black Display) technology. So can this phone retain the core features that make the C7 a solid performer, or have Nokia left too much out of the C6-01? For all the answers, read on.

Design:

The Nokia C6-01 is a chunky little thing. It's considerably thicker than the C7 and feels very squat. Also, despite a metal chassis, the device feels hollow with uneven weighting. Picking up the Nokia N8 in contrast, with its anodized aluminium body is a dense, solid pleasure, and the Nokia C7 despite being plastic feels evenly weighted and physically satisfying to hold. The Nokia C6-01 in stark contrast feels hollow, more like an empty metal tin than a well spec'd smartphone. The reality is, Nokia is a victim of their own success as we have high hardware expectations of the Finnish manufacturer, even from their lower to mid range phones such as the X3 Touch and Type and E5. Unfortunately, the C6 doesn't cut the mustard.



You can compare the Nokia C6-01 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

On one hand, the capacitive screen of the Nokia C6-01 is its best asset and on the other, its biggest downfall. Both endowed with Nokia's CBD technology and being sharper than that of any other Symbian^3 handset, it looks undeniably good, though measuring in at 3.2 inches, it renders Symbian^3 a challenge to use comfortably. Colours on the Nokia C6-01 are beautifully vibrant and have good punchy saturation levels, thanks to the AMOLED technology in use. Blacks are deep, with the standby Symbian^3 clock showing just how deep (with a fine line-art clock illuminated in white atop the jet black screen), and detail is good overall. At a resolution of 360x640 pixels, 3.2 inches do make for good clarity, but nevertheless, for sheer usability, we would choose to sacrifice some sharpness and make the screen take up more of the fascia, as is the case on the Nokia C7 for example.



Below the screen are three physical buttons, call, end and menu. They feel a tad loose to press, but nevertheless do the job. At the base of the Nokia C6-01 is a microUSB port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 2mm proprietary Nokia charging port. To the upper left side are two volume buttons, a hold slider in the middle and a single-stage camera button below. With no keys on the left hand side, jumping to the back, you'll find the 8MP fixed-focus camera, twin LED flash and loudspeaker. Slide off the metal battery cover, which feels pretty hardy, to reveal the battery with a SIM card slot underneath. To the right hand side of the battery is the microSD card slot, with a 2GB card in the box.




Overall, we're not too enamoured by the C6-01's design. Sure it's metal on the outside and we haven't got cause for concern regarding longevity, but the weighting is off and the proportions make the phone feel squat. All this coupled with the screen being a bit on the smaller side (considering today's standards), albeit sharp and vibrant, and it’s all kicking off to a mixed start.

Interface and Functionality:

With Symbian^3 on board, the Nokia C6-01 is far from unpredictable. Its port of the OS is unchanged from that of the Nokia C7 or N8, aside from the variations resulting from hardware (namely a lack of FM transmitter and reduced screen size). As alluded to in the Design section, the screen difference is a big barrier when using the C6-01 when compared to the C7 or N8. Anyone with remotely big hands should in turn steer clear of this phone in fear of frustration when typing a text message with the on screen QWERTY. The keys are small and the capacitive screen isn't accurate, resulting in repeated failed attempts. Unfortunately, we ended up using the phone entirely in portrait with its numeric pad and predictive text, which wasn't brilliant, but definitely worked better. It's worlds apart from other smaller handsets, as well as the C7 or N8. Despite the only 0.3-inch difference, the Nokia C6-01 provides a considerably worse texting experience.



Using the screen as a dialer is simple on the C6-01. Just press the Call soft key on the bottom right of the display and boom, dialer's up with big, visible keys that make for easy pressing. They are quick and responsive to the touch, and the haptic feedback playfully throbs with every press. We wish the entire touch-screen experience was so effortless.



This frustration when it comes to finger input extends to the rest of the OS, though to a lesser degree. Swiping, selecting, playing Angry Birds and pinching to zoom is just less enjoyable on the C6-01 due to its size. Nevertheless, unlike with texting, this is something the remainder of the OS can be gotten used to on the Nokia C6-01.

Our unit has a range of themes and is therefore able to offer a range of aesthetic looks to match both your personality and the phone's physical design out of the box, with more downloadable over wireless updates. It's home screen, comprising of a variable number of pages (1-3) is able to host up to 6 widget blocks per page. The pre-loaded widgets on the Nokia C6-01 we received included the Paramount Teaser Trailers, and E! Videos widget, as well as a host of generic Symbian^3 widgets. With superfluous widgets like this to hand, we would have really appreciated, for example, a simple power saving type bar as found on Android, and more core function widgets that could have saved us plodding through menus. Hopefully, with the OS's maturation, this will be addressed.



Pull up the menu and a nostalgic black backdrop with a grid of icons appears. All finger friendly, all found in previous iterations of Symbian and almost all leading to a menu within a menu. While other OSs at the moment are trying to at least appear like they're reducing the menu wading you'll be doing, Symbian^3 doesn't even try to disguise the layers you'll have to peel back to get to, say, your brightness settings. That said, being so familiar an experience, neither does it take an age to figure out how to get it done.



Social networking integration is limited to Facebook and Twitter linking to a widget. The phone will enable you to manually link contact information from your phonebook with Facebook, however, won't automate the process like other mobile OSs, so it is pretty impractical for multiple contacts.



Beyond that, the interface and organizer functions are very predictable. A finger-friendly calendar with a range of organizer tools standard to the OS and a standard set of Symbian functions with no surprises.

Camera and Multimedia:

All the camera options on the phone are the same as on the Nokia C7, at 8MP with a fixed lens and twin LED flash, we are on the whole impressed with the results on the C6-01. To take a snap, you can use the one stage camera button, or the dedicated on-screen icon that we found delivered less in the way of camera shake. The camera has face detection, an optional on-screen grid, as well as the following:

* Scene modes (auto, user defined, portrait, landscape, sport, night and night-portrait)
* Self timer (off, 2 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds),
* Colour tone (normal, vivid, black and white, sepia),
* White balance (auto, sunny, cloudy, incandescent, fluorescent)
* Exposure (-2 to +2 in increments of 0.5)
* ISO (low, medium, high)
* Adjustable contrast
* Sharpness (hard, normal, soft)

Colour reproduction is slightly dull and dreary in full auto. The Nokia C6-01 helps the problem with its vivid shooting mode which compensates for this in processing. The camera's recall for the last shooting mode you were on is however patchy, so you can't for example set the default camera mode to vivid which we found annoying.

A lot of these issues can be corrected from within the phone's in-built editing software, which is one of the most comprehensive editing experiences hard-wired into a mobile OS.

Detail is weak for objects under a meter away as can be expected. Take a look at the picture in the restaurant, however, beyond this it performs well.

Exposure on the Nokia C6-01 is not great but is more than tolerable when it comes to camera phones. The inbuilt processor does a good job of evening out high contrast scenes, and for the most part, delivers pretty usable photos. A notable absence is metering control.

Dynamic range is okay in brighter scenes, enabling a well set up shot to deliver a pretty picture. Turn the lights down, and it's naturally going to be another story. Blacks can get blanketed into a sea of noise and highlights unnaturally toned down.




On the topic of noise, this is an area the Nokia C6-01 has some issues. Without the super advanced sensor or the Xenon flash of the Nokia N8, its twin LEDs aren't enough to make night time shots look like they should. In its attempt of processing the image to lift brightness, the camera brings out huge amounts of noise. In good lighting however, when the image doesn't need to be processed heavily, blacks look clean without too much in the way of noise.

The Nokia C6-01 captures video at 3 resolutions - HD, VGA and very low res for multimedia messaging, with its HD 720p capture at 25fps leaving us impressed on the whole. As this phone isn't being heavily marketed as an HD camera phone, it was a pleasant surprise that the results weren't too far behind the N8. With the Nokia C6-01 producing a generally duller video and worse night time capture, it nevertheless offers the same shooting modes, including vivid to compensate for the dullness and a video light for darker scenes, something the Nokia N8 lacks.

Nokia C6-01 Sample Video:



Music on the C6-01 is a standard Symbian^3 experience, which is not a bad thing as it has had a very nice revamp since S60V5. Upon opening up the application, it opens artists and albums, unlike previous versions which would require an extra step to get here. Clicking the options button lets you view tracks by now playing, song, playlists, genres and podcasts. There is also a link to the Ovi Music store. When viewing albums and artists, holding the Nokia C6-01 in portrait displays a list, while landscape displays a coverflow like stream of album art. The Nokia C6-01’s coverflow is one of the smoothest we’ve seen and is very usable. The revamp however comes in portrait mode. Once an album or artist is selected, the screen will split, the top half displaying a mini coverflow, while the bottom half has the track list. This is very usable and makes single handed music browsing a doddle.



Internet and Connectivity:

Connected in much the same way as the Nokia N8 and C7, the Nokia C6-01 has the same wireless options such as GPS, Wi-Fi, quad-band GSM and penta-band 3G, Bluetooth as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microUSB port. All play their part in making this a well-connected phone.

With an improved mail client, it’s a piece of cake to set up email accounts such as Windows Live, Gmail and Yahoo!, and with Mail for Exchange support, inputting just a little more information will give you access to additional mailboxes as well as calendar, contacts and task sync.

Symbian^3's web browser sadly struggles. Web pages load accurately enough, however, stutter when swiping around, especially on larger pages. This can be remedied by installing the free Opera Mobile, though it's a shame the OS doesn't offer a competitive browser as standard.



The on-board GPS finds the Nokia C6-01’s position pretty quickly, however, given the screen-size, it's not much of a realistic GPS replacement.

Software:

The Nokia C6-01 doesn’t have a huge amount of software loaded on it, but what it does have is generally good. Take social networking for example, there is a social networking element from Ovi - Social. This integrates Twitter and Facebook, pulling up feeds into a widget on the home-screen, and linking it through to the installed Facebook / Twitter app. There is also Ovi Maps which does the job well of getting you from A to B. Quickoffice reader is also on the Nokia C6-01 as is Adobe PDF reader, but for the most part, that’s it, except for a Paramount trailers app which we didn't use more than once. Even the YouTube icon you'll see is just a link to the mobile site.

 

Performance:

The 680MHz ARM 11 processor does a good job of making everything run smoothly (except for web-browsing), and the Nokia C6-01 is at the top of the game in areas like video playback (due to great codec support). With 8GB of on-board memory and expandable memory up to another 32GB via microSD expansion, the Nokia C6-01 has considerable media potential, however, the screen's a bit small to get you truly immersed in a video and makes the whole OS feel laboured.

Voice calling is clear and crisp. When receiving a call on the Nokia C6-01, volume and audibility are good, even in busy environments. Clarity is also above average. The person on the other end also found our voice clear and loud enough.

Battery life on the Nokia C6-01 is good. The quoted talk time is 12 hours while the standby time is 17 days, it wins out amongst the Symbian^3 phones currently out. Practically, we found we could get two days of semi intensive use out of it. The Nokia C6-01 also defaults to a power saving mode when the battery is low, offering easy ways to extend the life if need be.

Conclusion:

As much as performance is on paper good, after a week of using the Nokia C6-01 we couldn't get 'into' it, like we could with the Nokia C7 and N8. The experience is generally hampered by the unpretentious screen size, the phone is too thick, looking like a numeric pad should slide out of the bottom and the weighting is pretty off. On the plus, it does offer a huge array of connectivity options, fantastic video codec support, as well as a vibrant and deep image quality, thanks to the AMOLED and CBD technologies. While  the Nokia C6-01 might be an ideal compact phone if you have very small hands and want a versatile handset without a large screen at a good price, it didn't become one of our favourites.
Decent alternatives for you might include the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy 3, the HTC Wildfire or indeed, if you can afford the step up, the Nokia C7 for a considerably superior Symbian^3 experience.

Nokia C6-01 Video Review: