First look: Nokia X6 and Comes With Music

When Nokia announced the Nokia X6 and the Comes With Music unlimited music download service I was very excited about the possibilities. I’ve divided this first look into two parts, trying to look at the X6 and Comes With Music separately although they are obviously one package as buying the X6 is the only way to get the unlimited Comes With Music downloads at this point in time in the Middle East.

Nokia X6

I see the X6 as the continuation of the 5800 Xpressmusic phone (reviewed Shufflegazine February 2009, p34). The 5800 was a nice phone in many ways and I bought it myself on the first day it was available in Dubai. It had a not very good resistive touch screen and the Symbian OS didn’t feel that well adapted to touch.

One of those issues Nokia has fixed in the X6 and that’s the screen. It’s now a 3.2 inch capacitive screen (360 x 640 pixels) a la iPhone and it’s just as good as Apple’s device on touching to launch things, scroll through something and everything else you need to do. The screen is also bright and clear so when it comes to the display Nokia has done a good job.

When it comes to the OS, Symbian doesn’t seem to have gone through much development in terms of UI at least since the 5800 and I’m still not that happy with the user experience. Symbian seems to be an OS in bad need of a significant overhaul and I hope that Nokia will do that soon or move on to some other OS. They recently confirmed their commitment to Symbian so let’s hope there’s an update in the works.

Things do happen fast on the X6 and I’ve experienced no major waits for apps to launch or for apps to finish some tasks. Whatever music and other things you download will be stored on the 16GB internal memory, which you can’t expand since there’s no memory card slot.

The camera is pretty good. At 5 megapixels (2592 x 1944 pixels) you get good photos at least in good light, which is the case with most smartphone cameras today. Carl Zeiss optics in the lens for the camera probably helps to keep the photo quality up. Autofocus, dual LED flash and even video light also add to teh functionality. In terms of video you can record VGA quality (640 x 480) at 30 fps. The speaker is also surprisingly good for a smartphone, good enough that it can even in a pinch get a small party started.

Comes With Music

Although the X6 hardware is not bad it also doesn’t really impress. It’s a different picture when we throw in the unlimited music download service though.

Moving on to talk about Comes With Music, let’s just reiterate that with the purchase of the X6 you get unlimited downloads from Nokia’s library of around 4 million songs for 12 months. After that time you get to keep the songs and keep playing them but you can’t download more unless you buy another Comes With Music device. The music is DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected and the PC player with which you can download and listen to music with is Windows only. Presumably that’s because it uses Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM.

The Windows app, Ovi Player, is a free download from Nokia and in functionality it’s basically like iTunes but simpler. You can browse around the music offerings, listen to previews of songs and download individual songs or entire albums. The interface is clean and does the trick but doesn’t show off the same ease of use and sleekness as iTunes. Once you connect the X6 with USB cable to your PC you can easily drag and drop songs and albums to the device and they’re copied over. You can also set it to sync automatically but you don’t have the same array of choices as in iTunes.

Before you start your unlimited downloading you have to enter a code that you get inside the box with the X6. I entered this on the X6 but I believe you can do it in Ovi Player as well. After that your unlimited downloads are tied to the X6 device, that PC and your Ovi account.

Downloading some 40 albums that first night alone after receiving the X6, I can see that there is a great attraction in the truly unlimited download possibilities. Even if I download an album now and delete it tomorrow I can just re-download it again after that. Sure, that’d be some extra work for me but it offers me flexibility and freedom.

The interface for downloading music on the X6 is far from great. It seems to be basically web based, which doesn’t offer the same fast operation and sleek interface that an app would. I sure hope that Nokia will produce a native app so that the experience on the phone improves a lot.

Although the Comes With Music media is heavily DRM protected the “analogue hole” still exists in the Ovi Player. This means you can burn Comes With Music downloads to audio CD. This will presumably reduce the quality some of the downloaded music but in my brief testing of a few albums it won’t be enough for most listeners to be concerned with.

Conclusion

Nokia has made great strides with the X6 compared to the 5800 but it’s still not a very remarkable phone in any respect. What does make it remarkable though is the Comes With Music service. Nokia should develop a native app for their phones that support Comes With Music and the app could do with a bit of polishing too but it’s an amazing service for any music lover. The way I see it very few people will be interested in buying the X6 just as a smartphone in itself but with Comes With Music it becomes a very attractive offering.

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