Nokia C6-01 review: Clear as black

It’s a good phonebook

The Nokia C6-01 comes with a fully functional phonebook, which can easily be synced with your exchange account. Symbian has been offering users virtually unlimited phonebook capacity and excellent contact management for quite some time. The Symbian^3 phonebook has gone in the right direction with the social network integration too.

The C6-01 phonebook is pretty good

Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name. You can also set whether the contacts from the SIM card, the phone memory and the service numbers will get displayed.

Selecting some of your contacts as favorites moves them to the top of the displayed list. This saves you quite a lot of scrolling.

Marking a contact as favorite moves it on top of the list

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

Editing Dexter's details

You can assign personal ringtones and videos to individual contacts. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

A really nice touch when editing a contact’s details is the option to enter their address by locating it on a map.

The social network integration includes Facebook and Twitter, which should be fine for the vast majority of users. However you will need to go an extra step to check out your contact’s status and then another one to see their profile. We agree it might have created a mess if that was all added to the already lengthy phonebook profile but one of those extra steps is probably a bit too much. We hope of optimization on that part in the future software updates.

Checking out the Silver Surfer Facebook profile through the phonebook

Telephony is fine too

Expectedly we didn't experience any call-related issues with the Nokia C6-01. Reception is solid, voice quality good on both ends of a call. The earpiece is loud enough and there were no interferences whatsoever.

Voice dialing is available on the C6-01 and gets activated by pressing and holding the call key on the home screen. It is fully speaker-independent and as far as we can tell performs greatly, recognizing all the names we threw at it.

The C6-01 comes with pretty well tuned voice dialing

In noisier environments though, its effectiveness might suffer. Bear in mind too, that if you have multiple numbers assigned to a contact, the system will dial either the default number or the first in the list.

Smart dialing is also here, practical as ever. You just punch in a few letters from the desired contact’s name and select it from the list that comes up to initiate a call. Searching by numbers doesn’t work though, but we think nobody will miss it.

You can also use smart dialling

Another option for starting a call is via the Favorites widget on your homescreen.

The C6-01 has the neat accelerometer-based feature that lets you mute the ringer by turning the phone face down. That same turn-to-mute trick also works for snoozing your alarm.

Thanks to the proximity sensor the screen turns off automatically when you hold the phone next to your cheek during a call. It also keeps the screen off when it is in your pocket and you get an incoming call.

The in-call screen

The Nokia C6-01 sat our traditional loudspeaker test. The phone did well there too. The Very Good mark it snatched means it should be loud enough for nearly every situation. More info on the test, as well as other results can be found here.

That's as far as ringing goes. But the loudspeaker also comes into play when listening to music - and in that role, it impressed us quite a bit. The sound is great and the only negative thing we have to say about it is that it gets muffled when you place the Nokia C6-01 on its back.

The messaging department still waits for a better keyboard

Update, 24.08.2011: We installed Symbian Anna - check out our impressions of the new, better keyboard over here.

The Nokia C6-01 can easily cater for all your messaging needs, but chances are you will find the virtual keyboard rather annoying. It’s not so much the QWERTY keyboard itself, which is spacious and comfortable but the fact that it opens in a separate screen with a dedicated text box. There’s no multi-touch support here either so two-handed typing is likely to produce more thumbs than usual.

The Nokia C6-01 messaging app

And that nuisance is not exclusive to the messaging department – it’s the way the keyboards function throughout the UI. C’mon Nokia, is that hard to put a decent keyboard?

The keyboard is probably the worst part of Symbian^3

All your incoming messages arrive in a common inbox. If you like, you can also get them sorted as conversations, in threaded view.

The Nokia C6-01 relies on a shared editor for all the types of messages. Stuff like a character counter in SMS goes without saying.

Sending Dexter a message

Insert some multimedia content the message is automatically transformed into an MMS. In that case, the character counter turns into a data counter showing kilobytes.

The Nokia C6-01 email client allowed us to setup our Gmail account quite easily, while getting it to sync with an Exchange ActiveSync server took a couple of tries. In most cases though, all you need is to enter a username and a password and you will be good to go in no time.

Multiple email accounts and various security protocols are supported, so you can bet almost any mail service will run trouble-free on your Nokia C6-01.

Messages can be filtered by various criteria such as date, sender, subject, priority or even by attachments, searching is available as well.

The email client

The client can download headers only or entire messages, and can be set to automatically check mail at a given interval. A nice feature allows you to schedule sending email next time an internet connection is available. This can save you some data charges since you can use the next available WLAN connection instead.

There is also support for attachments, signatures and basically everything you would normally need on a mobile device.