Nokia C6

Nokia C6 Price: $ 249.99

The Nokia C6 looks and feels good and is comfortable to use, with a good slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

There are lots of good features packed into the C6 including Wi-Fi and a five-megapixel camera with an LED flash.

The Symbian OS is slow and unresponsive and feels outdated, and the resistive touch-screen needs quite a lot of pressure for your command to be recognized.

The touch screen is slow, but it’s mostly responsive, and the keyboard makes texting easy.

There’s a good day or two of battery life inside the C6.

Nokia’s latest Smartphone is the C6, a reasonable priced, good-looking Smartphone stuffed full of features. But while it looks good on paper, there’s nothing new here.

Touch-screen on the Nokia C6

The touch screen on the C6 is the pressure-sensitive resistive kind, which flounders next to the plethora of far superior capacitive screens out there. And although it just makes the phone seem cheap rather than low-priced, Nokia is better at resistive screens than any other manufacturer. And with a resistive screen, you can use gloves or a stylus to operate the phone, and don’t need to be as exact as you do with a capacitive screen – but you do miss out on the sharp resolution. One problem with most resistive screens, the C6’s included, is that if you don’t press quite hard enough you need to input your command again, which gets frustrating when it happens enough?

Of course, with a resistive screen you also miss out on the multi-touch capacity that allows for things like the phone’s pinch-to-zoom. There is also no alternative like the N900’s Memo feature. You can double-tap but the text won’t reformat for you.

 Style of Nokia C6

The C6 is a great looking phone with a vivid 3.2-inch screen in a stylish matte black or chrome body. Beneath the screen sit three keys for call, call end and menu. Pressing on the side of the phone and the QWERTY keyboard slides straight out rather than the tilting action seen in previous Nokia smart phones. The keyboard spacious and feels good to use, with subtle backlighting that moves with your fingers. This is a nice touch that employs the phones ambient light sensor, although it is a little slow at times.

On the back of the phone sits the five-megapixel camera and flash, and on the side is the lock-screen switch which we’ve enjoyed on other Nokia touch-screen phones. On the top sits a 3.5mm audio port so you can plug in your own headphones; always a bonus.

Inside the phone are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an FM radio as well as the excellent Ovi Maps service. But while it sounds great on paper, the C6 is... well, uninspiring. It’s a great price and stuffed full of features but there’s just nothing new here.