Nokia 6500 slide review: Slide over slim

The music player comes with XpressMusic

The music player is almost identical to the one used in the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone and the Nokia 7500 Prism. It is a great player originally reserved for music-oriented Nokia phones and is obviously becoming the standard player for all recent Series 40 devices.

The player works with AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, WMA, AMR-NB, Mobile XMF, SP-MIDI, MIDI Tones (64-tone poly) and True tones.

The supported A2DP profile allows listening on Bluetooth wireless earphones. The player is highly customizable through a number of themes that are at your disposal.

Besides, there is a second skin that seems to suit it better compared to the conservative default skin. As in Nokia 6500 classic, the now playing tracks are displayed on the active home screen.

XpressMusic player interface with alternative skins

Besides managing all the typical functions of a music player, it also sorts songs by artist, album and genre. Different playlists can also be created to meet specific user requirements.

The music player has convenient functions and content management options

In the retail package you will find the HS-47 wired Nokia stereo headset, connectable via the 2.5 mm AV jack. The headphones manage quite decent sound and their quality will certainly meet most criteria. They get to be appreciated even more provided that the 6500 slide is not a music dedicated phone.

Moving back to the player, we have to say that it offers a large number of configurable options. The sonic experience is enhanced by equalizers and a stereo expansion function, which somehow failed to impress us. The equalizers do deserve attention, as they perform very well, while the opportunity to set own equalizer presets completes the range of possibilities.

As with Nokia 7500 Prism, changing the equalizer preset has an almost instant effect without the usual couple-of-seconds lag.

Nokia 6500 slide has only one loudspeaker located on its rear cover, right next to the camera. We did already mention that it is among the loudest we tried, though. A good thing is that it does not get muffled at all when the phone body is placed on its back on an even surface such as a desk.

The equalizers instantly change the way Nokia 6500 slide sounds

"...We were more than glad to realize that audio quality in Nokia 6500 slide is consistent with the commendable overall performance of the device. Our audio quality test showed very good results. It is only a fraction worse than Nokia N81 and is not that far away from the high Apple iPhone standard either...."

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Audio quality test

We were more than glad to realize that audio quality in Nokia 6500 slide is consistent with the commendable overall performance of the device. Our audio quality test showed very good results and convinced us that the slider is one of Nokia’s best tries in this aspect. It is only a fraction worse than Nokia N81 and is not that far away from the high Apple iPhone standard either. You can find more details about the test itself here. And there go the results, so you can see for yourselves what a talented musician Nokia 6500 slide actually is.

Nokia 6500 slide compared with Nokia N81 and Apple iPhone • the two frequency response graphs shows that 6500 slide performs very well, even compared with music dedicated phones

The stereo FM radio with Visual radio and RDS is another important difference from the 6500 classic. It uses the audio player interface and has the well known functions. The Visual radio application is helpful as it can download the radio stations in your area and save them to the handset with their names when an internet connection is available.

The FM radio with RDS and Visual Radio support

The video player is compatible with the 3GP and MP4 formats. The player supports video files of up to 30fps in VGA resolution for 3GP and MPEG-4 with a 2048 kbps bitrate or up to 15fps in QCIF resolution for 3GP at 192 kbps.

Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, as well as fast-forwarded or rewound. The possibility to remove the soft key captions to make better use of the full screen view mode is nice and improves video watching experience greatly.

Videos can be watched in fullscreen with the very nice video player

Additionally, as the phone has the CA-92U TV-Out cable supplied in the retail package, people can take advantage of watching still pictures or video files on the home TV set.