Nokia C6 review: A playful character

A decent phonebook

The Nokia C6 phonebook has virtually unlimited capacity and its functionality is certainly among the best out there. The Nokia C6 contacts list also has kinetic scrolling enabled and it’s among the best examples to find on a Nokia touch phone.

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

The fully-functional phonebook

When searching for a contact you make use of a clever dynamic keypad, which shows you only the letters that correspond to actual contacts. Once you type in a first letter, their number decreases, leaving only the ones that actually make up real contacts names. A really convenient tool indeed, even if you have a real QWERTY keyboard to use.

Nokia have a pretty convenient solution for searching the contact list

Editing a contact offers a variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one.

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

Editing a contact's details in the S60 phonebook Nokia C6

The Call log keeps track of your recent communications. The application itself comes in two flavors – accessed by pressing the Call key on the stand-by screen or from the main menu. The first one brings 20 call records in each of its tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls.

The call log keep a detailed record of your recent communications

If you access the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers.

Telephony: smart dial on QWERTY

Voice quality is good on both ends of calls, the earpiece sound is crisp and there were no reception problems whatsoever.

Smart dialing is enabled and the implementation is quite good. Ass soon as you hit a few keys on the keyboard, all the matches are displayed. You get the contact’s name and photo on screen – pressing and holding will bring up virtual buttons to start a voice or video call, or compose a text message.

Smart dialing works fine

You get an onscreen virtual dial pad too – it will be used we think, as the physical QWERTY keyboard doesn’t have a numpad – the number keys are on the top row (computer keyboard style).

The dialing pad

Voice dialing is also enabled on the Nokia C6. The voice dial mode is activated once you press and hold the Call key. It is fully speaker-independent and doesn't require pre-recording the names of your contacts. Bear in mind though, that if you have multiple numbers assigned to a contact, it will dial the default one.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer, you can silence an incoming call (or snooze an alarm) by simply flipping the handset over. Also when in calls, the proximity sensor makes sure the screen turns automatically off when you pick the phone up to your ear.

The in-call screen and available options

Using the hardware screen-lock switch you can not only unlock the phone but also silence it.

The Nokia C6 scored an Average in our traditional loudspeaker test. More info on our test can be found here.

QWERTY-fied messaging

The QWERTY-enabled Nokia C6 supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. They all share a common intuitive editor which by this point should be quite familiar to everyone.

The Nokia C6 message editor

The email client is really nice, there to meet almost any emailing needs. The easy setup we found in the latest Nokia handsets is also available with the C6. If you are using any public email service (it has to be among the over 1000 supported providers), all you have to do is enter your username and password to start enjoying email on the go. The phone downloads all the needed settings to get you going 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.

Checking email

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 traffic charges since you can use the next available WLAN connection instead.

Here might just be the right time to mention the input options on Nokia C6. Along with the pretty comfortable hardware QWERTY keyboard, the handset also offers a standard on-screen numpad and support for handwriting recognition. There is no virtual QWERTY keyboard.

The on-screen text input options: numpad and handwriting recognition