The New Nokia C6 – the best keyboard from a Nokia touch/QWERTY hybrid?

3.2" touch screen, 640x360. 4 row QWERTY keyboard.Â

On Friday, a touch-qwerty hybrid from Nokia’s Cseries surfaced. The Nokia C6.

I wasn’t expecting anything like this from the core series. I thought they’d at least be non-touch like the recent C5.

The C6 seems like a QWERTY/Touch hybrid for the masses. This is exactly the reason why Nokia’s range of smartphones might have a significant proportion that’s technically ‘underpowered’ compared to the competition. (I’m assuming it doesn’t have 1GHz processor)

NOT because they are helplessly lagging behind as Ovum’s recent “report” suggested.

But because Nokia is catering for mid-low end consumers who may want a piece of the smartphone pie but can’t or don’t want to pay high end prices. (Eventually those high end features trickle down, take the 5800 – Nseries grade circa 2008). This might be big if it hits 150-240GBP range.

Superficially, the C6 appears to be one of Nokia’s 5800 with a side slider QWERTY keyboard. However, it has the tiled homescreen interface reserved for Nokia’s N97/mini/future Symbian^3 devices.

• Is it Symbian^3? It’s using the Symbian^3 style theme/wallpaper (and some other slight changes).
• But to have Symbian^3, it would need to have processing power much higher than the N97/mini right? (If not, great news for N97 users if it means you might get S^3).
• So could this be the first 600MHz Symbian touch phone from Nokia and NOT the fabled X10?
• That dialpad is more reminiscent of S60 5th Edition rather than having those “dot indicators” of which homescreen you’re in.
• Most likely, it is S60 5th.

Anyway, onto the keyboard. It seems a standard Nokia fare at first but there are some marked improvements.

THE KEYBOARD

• Love it or hate it, the C6 has a D-Pad which eats a lot of space that could have been better served by having more keys. (Potentially 8 more – see crude paint job below)
• I don’t know what Nokia has against having a dedicated numbers row.
  • When they have a 3-row, an extra row would bring numbers row with secondary symbols as standard keyboard layout, but no.
• However, Ignoring the dpad/arrows, C6 has the most buttons on a Nokia touch/QWERTY hybrid keyboard.
  • More than the N97 (33), N97 mini (34) and N900 (34) as C6 has 39 buttons!
• It has two shift buttons for toggling caps lock, one on the left, the other on the right.
• It retains the symbols button to get additional symbols (easier than maemo 5’s silly 2 button combination)
• There’s a Control button. It seems it can also put the phone into silent mode. Control might be for easier copy and paste.
• Function button. The diagonal arrow suggests this is for secondary keys (like N900).
• Basic punctuation keys have dedicated buttons so you won’t need to press a button first to activate full-stop, comma or apostrophe .,’ This was a silly flaw in the N97, slowly improving with the N900/N97 mini (though it was still stupid to have apostrophe on the M)
• The Spacebar is in the middle (technically) when you’re holding the C6 (again see crude paint job below)

The only uncertain thing is the tactile feedback which I can’t glean from images alone. But if it’s on the same level as the N97 mini or N900 (fingers crossed, better) the C6 might potentially have the best keyboard from a Nokia Touch/QWERTY hybrid.

That’s not to say it’s the best out there (hello Touch Pro 2). Nokia is slowly getting the idea that if it’s worth putting a QWERTY keyboard, there should be investment in making a really good one (as opposed to just ticking a box). Ideally I’d have something like the N920 concept keyboard – or this N900/n92o keyboard mashup but that’s just me.

Not shown as it would take too much time...A dedicated numbers row could be achieved if the QWERTY shifted one key to the right (like N900) so you have Function/Control/Symbols on one side, freeing up the bottom row to take the z-m row of letters. The spacebar would then move to the right like Nokia likes.

Tags: C6, Cseries, Nokia, Nokia C6, QWERTY keyboard, S60 5TH EDITION, Symbian, Symbian^3, Touch, Touch Screen

Category: Cseries, Nokia, Symbian