Nokia C6 review: A playful character

Image gallery is still quite slow

The gallery of Nokia C6 is nicely touch optimized and there are sweep gestures enabled for flipping through photos displayed fullscreen.

You can sort images by date, title or size and you can also copy, move and delete them. Sending them via Bluetooth, email, MMS or sharing them online is also available straight from here.

Browsing images on the Nokia C6

The default view is portrait but you can go to landscape automatically thanks to the built-in accelerometer. A slide show is also available but it doesn't have as many customizable settings as on some Nseries handsets.

You can also zoom in the photos to see more detail. Zoom is controlled via either the volume rocker or an on-screen touch slider. In all other cases, images are displayed full screen.

The transition from portrait to landscape is automatic

One of the gallery problems is speed. Loading a picture takes a couple of seconds even for small images. If you have a large number of photos it might take ages before the thumbnails are generated. Zooming and panning are not that much faster either. On the other hand, kinetic scrolling has been vastly improved. The real nuisance though is that photos in a folder require a double tap to display – one to select, another to open.

Good ol’ music player

The Nokia C6 music player is pretty functional but its design could use a little freshening up - it hasn't changed since we first saw it in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. With user friendliness such a key aspect of full touch phones, it would be nice from Nokia to add some fun to the mix.

Your music library is automatically sorted by artist, album, genre and or composer and searching tracks by gradual typing is available. You can also create your own playlists in no time.

The music player does the job but could use a new skin

The process of adding tracks to the library is as simple as choosing the refresh option. You won't need to do that if you upload the music via the proprietary PC Suite application. With the huge number of supported formats you will hardly ever come across an audio file that the phone won't handle.

Album art is also supported and if you don't like the default sound of the device you can enhance it by applying one of the five equalizer presets. And if they’re still not enough you can set new ones up in a matter of seconds.

Creating a new equalizer preset is easy

Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. However , if you haven’t set the Music Player widget on the homescreen, you will have no way to control it. Your only option would be to go back to the full music player app using the Task manager.

Good audio quality

Nokia C6 isn't the loudest handset around but provides nicely clean audio output. The readings it achieved in our test are very satisfying and there is very little to moan about really.

The frequency response indicates slightly cut-off extreme high frequencies (nothing you can actually hear anyway) and the intermodulation distortion is slightly high but that's it. The noise levels, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk readings are just great, comparable to the best in class. Here go the results so you can compare it to some of the other handsets we have tested.

Nokia C6 vs Nokia C5 frequency response graphs

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

DivX/XviD support is still a no-go for the video player

The ample screen generally makes watching a video on the Nokia C6 a pleasure. However the lack of DivX and XviD codecs makes actually playing one somewhat of a harder task.

Of course, you can use the Nokia PC suite built-in application that automatically converts all kinds of video files to the format and resolution your phone supports. The automatic converter though seems to compress the videos too much, even at the highest quality setting, and they look over pixelated' but so far it's the easiest way of getting compatible video to your handset.

The video player is somewhat of a disappointment

The video player itself only works in fullscreen landscape mode but, since anything else would have made the widescreen display useless, this is understandable. When in fullscreen, a tap on the screen shows the controls which are normally hidden.

Using the RealPlayer, you can not only watch the videos saved in the phone's memory or in the memory card but also to stream Internet video content.

FM radio with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia C6 has a neat and simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. It also has RDS support and automatic scanning for an alternative frequency. This means that if you're on the go, the C6 should take care of staying tuned to your selected radio station.

We have no grudges with the FM radio