Click on me for full screen awesomeness!

The amazing people at Nokia Connects were nice enough to send me a Lumia 800 to trial out for a while, so first off a shout out them for making this possible, they have some truly wonderful people working for them.

Now a bit about the extent of my relationship with OSes other than Symbian/S^3, I have an HP touchpad (Firesale FTW) so I’ve used WebOS as well as Android (CM7 Mods FTW too) on it, I’ve never owned an iOS device but I’ve seen my friends iphones, ipads and ipods more than enough to know quite a bit about the OS; but I have NEVER used Windows Phone (be it Mango, 7 or even 6.5) so the experience with the Lumia 800 was weirdly exciting for me because it mixed an amazing hardware design with an OS that could only be described as “Different”.

Therefore the main point of this review is to hopefully give readers a good look at what Windows Phone is all about, more than a review the Lumia 800 itself. The way I see it most of us Nokia fans were too busy fawning over the N8-00 when Windows Phone was first released (November 2010), of course back then S^3 was still fresh so nobody could have possibly imagined that within a year Nokia phones would be running Windows, for that reason I realized/guessed (possibly incorrectly) that a lot of Nokia fans have no idea what WP is like (to be specific: ME), I don’t want to get into a discussion of whether it was the right choice or not, the fact is that it IS done so let’s see what the new Nokia looks like.

#1) Unboxing + Design

#2) Setting Up the 800

#3) Metro UI & People Hub

#4) Camera:

1) Unboxing + Design:

Box Contents all lined up

There are more than enough unboxing videos of the Lumia 800 floating around the internet, and the hardware specs of the device have been covered more than enough; regardless no review would be complete without an unboxing so here’s my attempt (My first unboxing vid ever, I obviously did a wonderful job, dropping the device before it’s even out of the box and all!)- filmed using my ingenious N8 quad-pod (patent pending)

My first impression of the device design wise is that it’s GORGEOUS, (I had requested a Cyan one but oh well). Even though the 800 is made of polycarbonate (which in all honesty is basically plastic) Nokia still have managed to make it feel amazing. I fail to understand how this feels sturdier than me Aluminum bodied N8 but it does, it feels more compact (which just proves that you can make a device that isn’t glass or metal that doesn’t feel like twig- *cough cough SII Cough* ).

The phone comes with what you would expect: Standard 3.5mm earphones, A Micro-USB cable which doubles out as a charger when attached to the plug converter thing; however Nokia have gone above and beyond, providing a Silicon-Rubber housing for the 800, which hardly adds any width to the device at all, and has a super snug fit (personally I wouldn’t use it; simply because I love the feel of polycarbonate). As you might have noticed in the Quick unboxing I wasn’t all too impressed with the headphones accompanying the device, they had no dedicated music control (just a single talk/answer button) and I couldn’t get them to stay in my ears at all! Not even to test out the sound quality, I literally could not keep them in for more than 5 seconds.

Of course the Lumia 800 (and the 710) use Micro-sims rather than normal sims (seeing as this is a trial device I couldn’t bring myself to cut my sim for a review sorry). The sim and charger port mechanism is really interesting and/or weird; the charger port/USB  is a sort of flip thing where you press down on one side to make it pop-up (very fragile, so be careful), once the USB port door is open you can slide the micro-sim slot to the left a bit to have it pop-out as well; the cool part is that the area around the sim and USB slots are magnetic, to ensure proper closure of the ports I guess.

Design-wise I think it would have been better to have the USB port at either end of the device, not next to the Headphone jack, just because it would be easier to press down on (really difficult to explain but anyone who’s tried the 800 or the N9 should be able to understand).

The 800 comes with a 3.7″ (800×480) AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, which like the N9 is ever so slightly curved making those glorious swiping motions much more fun. I’ve read reviews about where people were bashing the 800 and the N9 for using something called PenTile display (basically if you look really close you *should* be able to see a bunch of lines running through the screen) personally I see nothing at all; in fact the screen is the second best thing about the 800 (after the amazing design), due to the curvature of the screen anything on the display looks like it’s floating somewhere between the phone and you’re fingertips (in the interest of being un-bias it is possible that I don’t see the PenTile because I’m upgrading from my N8 which has a less than acceptable Pixel density).

2) Setting Up the 800:

The first time you boot the Lumia 800 you have an option to set-up your Windows Live account as well as your Nokia account immediately before getting  to anything else (visible in the un-boxing video); however since the WiFi connection wouldn’t have been setup yet I skipped over that part and set it up later. As soon as the Lumia detects a Wifi network in range it asks if you’d like to set-up a Wifi connection with it, alternatively you can set it up through “Setting>Wi-Fi”, However try as I might I wasn’t able to locate the “Nokia Account” later (by the prompt I understood it was referring to a Nokia account similar to my Symbian Nokia account and not a Nokia/Ovi Email account).

Is this Nokia account the Same as Nokia email?

Nokia have included a handy tool called “Contacts Transfer” which can be used to copy all your contacts from an older Symbian device over to your new WP device via Bluetooth, which works quite smoothly (demonstrated below), however one feature I missed was the ability to transfer SMS messages from your older phone onto the new one as well (this function as available between older Symbian devices and Symbian 3).

Setting up your accounts can be a bit tricky if it’s your first time around on WP (check out the Video for a walk-through), I spent the first 30 minutes trying set it up from my “ME hub” rather than from the “Settings>Emails+Accounts” menu. Once you’ve got your accounts up and running all your contacts from all accounts (Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Twitter) will appear merged together in your “People Hub”. You can choose to filter out these accounts leaving only ‘Windows Live’ (Phone numbers/contacts are saved to your windows live account); unfortunately with 4 different accounts synced my people hub became a complete mess, cluttered with emails of people I only contacted once mixed with random Facebook friends and twitter followers; a feature that is definitely needed here is a confirmation of contact syncing when the details aren’t enough e.g.: if I have two contacts simply named ‘Joe’ on two different accounts I would have preferred a prompt checking if this the same Joe or not.

3) Metro UI & People Hub

Side By Side against My N8 Running Belle

One of the most unique features about WP is the Metro UI/Tiles look, rather than Widgets; WP is based on a single ‘Homescreen’ on which you can place as many  ‘Live Tiles’ as you want, but only 2 or 1 tiles per row depending on the width of the tile (Reminds me of early S^3 widgets). The tiles on WP Mango are called “Live Tiles” due to the fact they are constantly updated/refreshed to give a more interactive feel to the user, allowing you to view your missed calls, emails, messages and much more without having to access said location; the Live tile simply displays the fact that you have a message on your home screen.

When In standby mode there is almost no way to tell if the Lumia 800 is even on or not, unlike the N9 which has the amazing “double-Tap” to wake up, or S^3 phones with their always on Clocks, the 800 appears dead unless the lock screen button is pressed, upon which you get to the unlock screen which displays your upcoming events, the time & date, notifications as well as battery life.

Once the phone is unlocked you get to the Metro-UI which can be customized to multiple colors depending on your preference, to change the theme color simply head to ‘settings>Theme and choose whatever color suites your mood.  However the Lumia 800 comes with a special “Nokia-Blue” color for its UI which seems to be the most attractive on the phone.

Windows Phone distinguishes itself from other OSes by bringing your contacts to life, on WP contacts stop being names on your phone and become ‘people’; hence the People Hub, which combines all your accounts from Google, Windows Live, Facebook and Twitter all in one place to keep you updated and constantly linked. WP automatically merges contacts from different accounts with the same name together (which lead to a bit of confusion due to incorrect merging), each contact has a number or tabs including: the main contact info/Profile, What’s New (which brings you the latest updates from FB and twitter), Pictures (which brings all pictures recently uploaded) and history which displays your latest contact with the contact be it via email, phone or FB message.

I love how some of the next pane/tab is visible at the end of the screen

The Virtual keyboard on WP is an absolute joy to use, with accurate text correction and nice tapping sounds every time a key is hit, it’s definitely my favorite onscreen keyboard; a complete 180 degrees polar opposite of the atrocious stock S^3 keyboard that we all love to hate. I didn’t bother reviewing the Keyboard here as Jay has already made a nice comparison video between Symbian Anna and WP 7.5 which can be found HERE. My only complaint about the onscreen keyboard would be that in landscape mode the space on the edges is not fully utilized, losing about a complete centimeter to the time in the upper left corner.

Market place & Pre-Loaded Apps:

Apps… the whole reason Nokia have a Windows Phone, “ecosystem” that magical word, what’s so special about the Windows Phone market place? At this point I’m going to say something that I’ve never believed until I used WP: “Quantity is irrelevant!” this is where my usage of Android kicks in, sure android might have a gazillion apps, but almost 75% of them are buggy, have a garbage UI and consist of trying to connect two dots together (Nokias Snake on the 2100 was more sophisticated than some of the apps on the android marketplace).

Windows Phone on the other hand seems to be promising in both aspects, quantity as well as quantity; the growth of the WP market is steadily increasing (currently at 55K) but what’s more important is the fact that they are fifty-five thousand quality apps out there. The one consistent factor between almost all apps I’ve tried on the Lumia 800 is the fact that they have a beautiful UI alongside a well coded game/app engine (due mainly to the fact that Microsoft is offering large incentives to bring in the developers).

The market place app itself is beautifully designed dividing its content into Nokia collection/apps/games/music/podcasts, with detailed classification of each category/genre of apps and games; for example games in the market place are classified into Xbox live/ top/ free/ new making finding whatever you’re looking for loads easier. Another wonderful feature is that as far as I can tell every single app/game has a trial mode meaning no need for buyer’s remorse, try out the app if you like it buy it; if not nothing lost.

One feature setting the Lumia 800 apart from the rest of the Windows Phones out there is the inclusion of the ever amazing Nokia Maps/Drive, which is just as smooth and amazing as it is on S^3 with a considerably faster GPS lock than that on my N8. Maps can be downloaded for your selected country from within ‘Nokia Drive’ to enable navigating in offline mode. Nokia Maps also has a feature to find nearby popular places, relying on tour guides as well as other users reviews to give you the best recommendations of nearby places.

Places of Interest

Nokia also includes their own “Nokia Music” which enables you to connect to Nokias Own music server (formerly Ovi Music) rather than connecting to the Windows Phone marketplace to download any tracks you might have purchased on your old Symbian phone. Nokia also included ‘Gig Finder” which locates nearby concerts/events depending on your location and will display them within the app (sadly no gigs were located when I tried this in Jordan); one other interesting feature is something called “Nokia Mix Radio” which is their own Online Radio service that customizes playlists depending on what music you have on your phone, to help find music similar to your taste. Nokia Mix Radio enables you to directly download the tracks you enjoy from the Music store; however my Lumia 800 didn’t have Mix Radio at all, nor was there an option to activate it (possibly region related?? Although it’s an online music service so that shouldn’t matter???).

*Should* Display Mix Radio as well in the list

4) Camera:

Now to what is usually the most notable feature on Nokia phones: The camera. Without beating around the bush I must say that the 8mp shooter in the Lumia 800 was sadly a let-down, here’s why. The main reason is that alot of previous N8 owners who fell in love with the N8s camera are going to be switching to WP soon, unless they want to stick around for the rumored N8 successor which is supposedly running Symbian as well; regardless for me transitioning from the king of camera phones down to the Lumia 800 (yes, I used the word ‘down’ cause it is indeed a couple of steps down) was a difficult process, on my N8 I became used to “Quick-Draw Point and Shoot” with almost all pictures coming out at near professional range quality. The Lumia 800 on the other hand is a phone that is difficult to get a handle on, but once you get setting just right to it can still produce an impressive shot.

Now the 800s camera isn’t as horrible as I’m making it out to be but as mentioned I’m comparing it to the abilities of my N8. Normal everyday capturing is quick and simple, and will usually give you a decent picture provided there’s enough lighting available; however the landscape low light photos were absolutely dreadful barely capturing any light at all (smaller lens?) compared to the iPhone4s and the N8 it didn’t stand a chance at low-light images. Macro images surprisingly were extremely nice, even with below optimal lighting they still came out stunning, even somehow surpassing those of my N8s when it came to super closeups.

Random well-lit photo, with full auto settings on.

A close-up macro mode in low light, surprisingly nice (the candle is surrounded by glass so no flash was used for capturing this)

Cookie anyone?

Un-impressive low light scene capture, the water isn't supposed to be lit, it's just normal water (BTW that's the worlds tallest fountain)

Same Exact photo taken with the iPhone4s 8MP camera.

More Images Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23218958@N05/sets/72157628855141245/

The video capturing was above par on the 800, it has the ability to shoot at 720p with full autofocus, which results in decent sample videos even with indoor fluorescent lighting; the autofocus was snappy to respond and coped well with closeups/macro videos. However it did seem that some colors ended up over saturated when filming up close, in the video below (final 5 seconds or so) the crown of the parrots head is actually closer to a greenish-yellow, yet in the video it appears almost blue/turquoise, regardless I can’t complain about the Lumia 800s video capturing abilities as it was overall impressive.

Another point worth mentioning is the beautiful camera/video camera UI on windows phone, it’s a completely flexible experience allowing you to swipe directly into your gallery from the camera view, as well as pinch out to view your previously taken pictures side by side with whatever you’re looking at in normal camera view. I also loved the display of the video length during recording; the big numbers on the screen are large enough to be viewed from 3 feet away yet un-obtrusive to your recording view.

Split screen of previous image alongside live view from camera lens

I’m not sure whether this option is unavailable in all WP or just the Lumia 800; but there is no ability to zoom while recording (you have to select your preferred zoom level before starting, and stick with it). Another thing that puzzled me is the inability to use the volume buttons to zoom in/out in normal camera mode, nor can you pinch to zoom, the only way to zoom is to use the onscreen +/- buttons which in all honesty is annoying.

Beautiful Camera UI

5) Media (Pictures, Videos and Music)

Media on Windows Phone is split into Music and Pictures, with each type of content appearing in its respective category; while videos appear in both categories. Both Pictures and Music come with their own live tiles that continuously randomizes different background depending on the content of the phone.

The Photo hub consist of 3 different panes Content on Phone/What’s New/ Favorites, Displayed on a backdrop of a random photo from your album split onto three separate screens giving a sort of panoramic view to your pictures.  “Content on the phone” display all content on the phone itself be it downloaded, captured or photos from a favorite contact you chose to save on your phone. “What’s New” displays the latest photo media coming from all accounts you have linked to your phone be it Twitter updates, Facebook, or skydrive pictures shared via Windows Live; What’s new also enable you to directly view all comments on a specific picture and to add your own without having to enter the browser or Social hub. Favorites are a set of photos you choose to star or add to favorites, making them quickly accessible and making them appear as the background for the Photo Hub and the Live tile more often.

The Music Live Tile will take you to your music library where you are first greeted with a pane containing your last played music, and currently playing for quick access; from there you can quickly access the rest of your music library and playlists by simply swiping to the right. The Music hub directly supports entering the Zune music store to download Music, Videos or Podcasts from the Music Marketplace; exclusive to Lumia phones however is “Nokia Music” which also syncs your OVI account music files to your phone and bringing you access to Nokias “Mix Radio”.

When playing music you have an option to use “Smart DJ-Mixer” which is an addition to Windows Phone Music player, basically it searches your music library to tracks similar to what you choose to play be it by Genre, Artist, or Album and plays them after each other to suite your mood, a nice feature for those of us with 16GBs of music. Music can also be controlled from your homescreen or lock screen by simply pressing the volume buttons, which will bring up the currently playing track with the options to skip/previous and Play/Pause.

Videos as mentioned can be accessed from both the Music hub and Picture Gallery, playing only in landscape mode with the ability to resize to full screen or play in a slightly windowed mode. Unfortunately the Lumia 800 is incapable of playing DivX files and .AVI which must first be formatted into .Mp4 through Zune. As a long time Symbian user I found myself constantly long pressing on photos looking for  a “mark multiple” option, which sadly does not exist, therefore you have to delete each photo/video separately one-by-one.

6) Bing Search:

Search on Belle Vs. Mango (Winner is obvious)

In all honesty the moment I opened the search feature on the Lumia 800 I tried to look into the settings on how to switch the default search engine to Google (hint: you can’t), for good reason though. The Bing search that comes bundled with the Lumia 800 is nowhere near the slow socially awkward search engine that I last tried about 4 years ago, the new Bing is fast smooth and sexy, coming with image search, voice input search and a music finder (similar to Shazam) it truly is a fully functional wonder.

The background Image on the Bing Search (Quickly accessed by the capacitive magnifying glass button) changes every day showing you a random image with a set of new ‘information squares’ related to the search image, which will either take you to a related Photo or Map location depending on the ‘hint’.

Normal text searches are straight forward carried out on Bing bringing you Web Results, Images Results and even Location based results depending on where you are. Once your location is enable you can select any location from Bing maps and search for Highlighted areas, Shopping places, ‘eat & drink’ as well as ‘See + Do’. My two favorite features regarding Bing search are Picture Search and music detecting service, Picture search scans QR codes and gives you their direct link to their source, or it can be used to scan text and translate it into multiple different languages. The even more impressive feature is the music identifying feature (Anyone who’s used Shazam knows what I’m talking about); it took less than 5 seconds of playing “Adele’s- Set Fire to The Rain” (at random time-frames) for it to pop-up as the result with a link directly to the Zune Marketplace in case you feel like purchasing whatever track you just found.

Overall Bing search is extremely impressive (although I’d prefer it if Microsoft stopped promoting the phrase ‘Bing it’), if Bing had as much functionality on my desktop as it did on the Lumia 800 then it would be my default engine in a heart-beat.

*Note: I didn’t review the browser due to the fact that I’m not really good at browser comparison, the only note I can say about it is that don’t let the fact that it’s called “Internet Explorer” put you off, it’s really good

7) Miscellaneous:

(Some of the things about WP in general that bugged me, especially being a long time Symbian user)

First off of course is the fact that WP is a closed platform, meaning there’s a very limited amount of freedom when it comes to customization and side-loaded apps; in all honesty my biggest argument against iPhones was “at least I can do what I want without jumping through hoops”, sadly you can’t say the same when you’re using a Windows Phone. Until almost 2 weeks ago Windows had offered a small piece of solace in the form of “Chevron unlocker” which for $9.00 enabled you to purchase a token that ‘unlocks’ your Windows Phone device, this unlock enabled you to side-load (install from outside the marketplace) up to 10 apps at a time; not exactly Symbian/Android freedom, but it was nice. Unfortunately as of two weeks ago Chevron ran out of unlockers and this option is no longer available; the only alternative is a $99 developers unlock which is quite pricy for something that most of us have grown to as a standard. Sadly the lockdown on outside settings isn’t just for applications, even the ringtones are just a selected few, without the direct option to set your favorite tunes as your ringtone. The limitations have even hit Bluetooth, meaning you can’t send media files over Bluetooth from one device to another (I tried multiple times with my N8 as well as my touchpad to the Lumia but always received the same failure message).

Another puzzling ‘feature’ about Windows Phone is that every-time you lock the screen your WiFi disconnects, presumably in the interest of saving battery, but I found this ridiculous; considering how  if your connected to cellular data the data connection remains active when the device is in standby which definitely takes a much larger toll on the battery life. At the very least there should be an option to stay connected to WiFi while device is locked, how else would someone without a data plan receive Emails and Notifications???

The battery life on the 800 is ‘amusing’ to say the least, as it doesn’t seem to follow any laws at all; the first two days that I received the device it barely made it 6 hours each day (without a sim/airplane mode)! However the battery life has steadily increased with me over the past week to make it easily through a complete day; add to that the promised Battery update sometime mid-January and it shouldn’t be a problem.

Props to @Stephenquin58 for this!

Of course if you plan on owning a windows phone you’d better have Zune installed on your PC/Laptop as it’s the only easy way to copy content to and from your mobile. Thankfully though Zune isn’t as tedious to use as the original Ovi Suite.

Wrap-Up:

The Lumia 800 is a beautiful phone, paired with what is possibly one of the most beautiful and consistent UIs I’ve seen so far, sure it might have some niggles in the design and setbacks in the OS being walled up; but when I think about the amazing People hub, the beautiful screen design and the general feel of the device it’s definitely a phone that shouldn’t be passed on, or at least not before taking an extremely long look at what you’re giving up, followed by second thoughts and doubts if you choose something else.

Windows Phone is an OS that was obviously not rushed, it was kept under covers until almost every bug and defect were weeded out, appearing only in its best; unfortunately the OS itself is more walled up than most Symbian fans will be used to, but nothing that’s an absolute deal breaker alone.

Obviously the 800 isn’t for everyone, if you want a N8 Successor this IS NOT the phone for you, if you want a second N900 this IS NOT the phone for you. If like me you grew bored of having an amazing phone that unfortunately had almost no proper apps, running an OS that had potential but was neglected and under-appreciated, if you want to upgrade your phone to something more modern with an OS that’s silky smooth and a beautiful yet strange UI then THIS IS the phone for you.

-Once again thanks to the people at Nokia Connects for making this possible, you guys are great!

It’s been a while since I last posted, for numerous reasons of course, but now with a bit of time on my hands, I figured I’d post a couple videos supplied to us by  Jim on a few of the MeeGo UX’s currently being worked on by dev teams around the world.

First up is a video of XBMC being demo-ed on the Lenovo ideapad running an undisclosed version of MeeGo. XBMC is a cross platform media player with some of their work being seen in high-profile devices like the original Xbox. While I’ve never been one to consider flashy visuals over an easy and functional interface, this video here definitely deserves a mention. Video after the break.

More information on the XBMC project can be found at xbmc.org/ and instructions for installing to MeeGo can be found at the following link. http://www.madeo.co.uk/?page_id=605.

The second video up is of the Alpha version of RDUX 2.0 being developed almost exclusively using QtQuick.

Pretty cool huh! Give XBMC a try and let us know how you feel about it!

With rumors circling the internet that the final, release version of the N8 firmware is scheduled to be finished by next week (crosses fingers) The latest video that I found on the site, http://tv.mediaprovider.se should hopefully give a pretty clear insight into the sort of performance and applications (read: games) we can expect to see when the N8 is FINALLY released. From the little available here, there should be few doubts in anyone’s mind as to whether this device will be sluggish, unperforming and underwhelming at release.

Give it a look and tell me what you think!

Youtube link to the 1st video! Thanks NeNoRmAl!

Update: Another video was taken on the 25th of August, just 2 days ago. The video demonstrates a few of the normal features available with the OS.

Give it a look.

Via

via NokiaHomebase

When I first heard about this video I thought it was just a random Nokia advertisement because I have seen a very similar one to this one with the classic 5800, but Nokia seem to make music a important feature for the N8 with Ovi music Unlimited which “Comes with Music” in other countries. Nokia where asked if this name change was going to happen universally and they said no it is currently called Ovi Unlimited Music in India I believe.

Does anyone actually use Ovi music I don’t at the moment I have got to shamely admit I use an iPod Touch and iTunes for all that stuff, there’s no denying that Apple rule that market and even the Zune is pretty good, but with the cover flow style cover art on the N8 it seem like Nokia is taking music seriously again now if they just make the Ovi Music store DRM free I would be a happy bunny

Thanks for Marc L for the heads up

I’m sure you have already seen my previous 2 posts…if not check them out:

Nokia X6 Unboxing (Stop Motion)

Gallery: Nokia X6 vs N900 vs N97

I’ve had the X6 now for 4 days and honestly I was split about it until i started to write this review and realised what this phone can really do! I love the look and feel of the phone, it’s comfortable and easy to hold, a bit of weight so you know it’s there but not so much that it feels like it’s weighing you down. I’m not going to bore you with a full list of everything it has as you can see that on the Nokia Site, but it does have a lot, like 5mp camera, A-GPS, capacitative screen (but no multi touch …yet), 32GB memory, so with all this you can’t go wrong (or can you!).

In the Box

• Nokia X6
• Nokia Battery (BL-5J) – 1320mAh
• Nokia High Efficiency Charger (AC-8)
• Nokia Connectivity Cable (CA-101) – normal length cable, not the mini one.
• Nokia Stereo Headset (WH-701) – In ear with incline controls.
• User Guide
• Mini DVD
• Comes With Music leaflet – This has your CWM activation code on it.

Nokia X6 - Accessories

You get a decent set of kit in the box, and I’m liking the new(ish) WH-701 headphones, not only are they in-ear, they also have all the controls you would expect on them, such as call, volume, play/pause, next track and previous track, and so it’s not pulling down on you, it has a clip on the back to hold it in place. I did notice that on the proper product page it shows that it comes with the WH-500 headset, the UK shop does show the WH-701, but I checked the Finland shop and it says it has the WH-500! – I think I prefer the WH-701 but know some people might have wanted the WH-500.

Headsets

Software

OK I’ll start with the software, it is basically the same Symbian S60 5th OS that you see on the 5800 and 5530. There is kinetic scrolling in most places like option lists, contacts, etc., but annoyingly there are also a couple of places without it, i.e. in the main menu. Not sure why Nokia decided to do this, but might just bug me more then anyone else because I had the N97 where they put it quite literally everywhere when they finally added it!

This is Nokia’s flagship X-Series phone and as such they finally put the long awaited Capacitive screen on it, which is a joy to use, but I think Nokia forgot one key thing…where is the multitouch??? I have heard speculation that it’s not got it because of apple parents, but then how can palm, HTC, etc. launch phones with it, so lets just hope this is something coming in a future update.

X6 Music - Main

With the music player, it is the standard now that Nokia have set, so you get the album arts, if they are available, the option to change several settings, such as equaliser, shuffle, balance (make one side louder – can be useful for when you connect to external speakers), loudness (Bass booster effect), and Stereo widening.

X6 Music - Equaliser

X6 Music - Setup

One of the things I was disappointed to find was that there was no FM Transmitter, which I think is a shame, as this is a Music phone, and it is something the phone should have!!

The phone does have support for e-mail via IMAP, POP and even Mail for Exchange, but i’m sure that a lot of Nokia fan’s have noticed this in the all latest Nokia smartphones. To pass the time you also get a few games which are pre-installed on the phone which are: Spore, D Mix Tour, and Asphalt4 which all appear to be full versions.

The phone does auto-rotate into landscape mode in almost every place, such as contacts, gallery, maps, even the main menu, and I have read a quick review from someone else which says it’s slow but I personally have not found this to be the case…it takes about 1/2 to 3/4 of a second for it to switch which personally I think is right, any quicker and I think it would just switch over when you don’t want it to. (I will have to admit to you guys that one of the main reason’s I didn’t have this review done earlier is because for some reason my auto-rotate stopped working after a day…it was probably something I did or just the S60 5th playing up, but after a quick reset, all is well! – I will update you if it happens again).

One of the key places this auto rotate is used is for texting or any sort of text input, where in portrait mode, you have the Alphanumeric keypad, and the only way to use the qwerty is by rotating it into landscape, and it makes sense because having a capacitive screen and therefore not being able to use a stylus, trying to fit a qwerty in portrait mode would have been a huge mistake. The only things that are missing from the input methods are predictive on the qwerty and handwriting mode, but I suppose the latter is missing because of the lack of stylus use and honestly I doubt many people use it (although it does have full screen hand writing mode for Chinese text input!)

Alphanumeric vs qwerty

When I was reading through the specs on the Nokia site, I noticed 2 things straight away, it said it had a image and video editor on the phone so I had to check this out as the video editor has been missing from soo many of the N-Series phones lately…strange they would add to a music phone! (this doesn’t mean we want you to take it off Nokia!) Firstly the image editor, which was exactly what you had seen on the N97, etc, you can crop, change brightness, contrast, resize, etc.

Image Editor

Now for the bit I really wanted to check out, the video editor, it seems you can do a few very useful things:

Video Edit Options

• Merge with another video or image file (shows image for about 2-3 seconds before or after the clip!)
• Change sound – Replace the audio with a music file or a pre-recorded audio commentary, etc.
  

  Insert Sound Clip

• Add Text (Shows for about 3-4 seconds before or after the clip) – i.e. if you want to add a title or credits!
• Cut the video (remove some of the start and/or end of the video)
  

  Video Cut

• Take snapshot – this is actually in the  cut menu, just move the top blue/purple bar to where you want and click Options –> Take snapshot

To give you an idea i have shot a video on the x6 and edited it in several ways and saved it separately, you can see results below:

Original Video taken on X6 – Unedited

Edited Video taken on X6 – (Text and image added to start, 8 seconds cut off end, and audio track changed)

As you can see it’s easy enough to edit on there and I love this feature, so please Nokia don’t remove it from future smartphones!

Hardware

External

I think if you look at the phone, there is no doubt that this is a great looking phone, so far everyone I have shown it to loves the look and feel of it. Here are a few Nokia press photo’s (because I can’t take photo’s to do the phone justice!):

Nokia X6

Personally I got the Black/Red one as I think it looks better but they are both very nice.

The back case is matt hard plastic which I think feels good in your hand, not cheap or flimsy and still has a gloss finish on the top, bottom and front to complement the capacitive glass touch-screen. There is some metal on either side of the screen which is flush thankfully as I found the raised trim on the N97 and N900 a bit annoying. The only other place you see metal is around the camera which is slightly raised and I assume this is to help protect the camera lens as it does not have a cover.

Something I am glad the X6 has is the mechanical buttons for the call/end call/menu like on the 5800, I was not a fan of the touch ones on the 5530 and the N97.

As I’ve already mentioned, the capacitive screen is great to use, no more pushing down to try to press something, but as it’s just the generic S60 5th software it sometimes seems to register the press (i.e. highlight a link) but it does not actually go to the link I clicked which can get annoying…although that might just be me. Now it’s just missing multi touch so common Nokia!!

The inputs are all at the top of the phone, from left to right you have Micro USB connector (Data only – not sure why they have not made it a charger), 3.5 mm audio/video jack, 2mm charger connector, and the Power button. The left side only has the SIM slot and stereo speaker, right side has volume/zoom key, lock key, and camera key, and the base just has the hole for the mic and lanyard.

Nokia’s standard now seems to be the 5mpx camera, which personally I think is just right for phones, do you really need something that takes pictures bigger then 2592 x 1944 pixels?? and if you want to record video’s you have a decent 640 x 480 and up to 30 fps (which is TV quality) – you can also choose widescreen mode which just reduces the hight of the video to 352 but personally I don’t see the point to this as I’d much prefer to shoot at full resolution and crop later if I wanted to (or edit using the in built video editor I mentioned earlier).

Internal

I’ll start off with the storage, you have a huge 32GB to play with here and with the Comes With Music service, you can enjoy a years free music to fill it up, it’s annoying that there isn’t a memory card slot, but to be honest it doesn’t really need it! On top of that, Nokia haven’t skimped out on the C: Phone memory which you get an ample 300mb which I doubt you will fill up!

One of the first things I actually tested on the phone was the GPS, which I love on this phone, it actually picks up (and keeps single) within 5-10 seconds, 90% of the time for me, and that sometimes goes up to about 15-20 seconds when I’m indoors which is probably one of the best I have seen! I won’t go into the navigation as it’s the standard ovi Maps 3.0 but so you know you do get 10 separate days of navigation free (which means you can use any one of those days when ever you want!)

Navigation Licence

You get full 3.5G (HSDPA) and WiFi support, so you know you are getting the fastest internet speeds and loading for normal sites seems quite quick, although some flash heavy sites do take a little while but I personally can’t fault the phone for that!

Overall

Ok I thinks that’s about it, my personal opinion of the phone is that it’s a joy to use and I want thinking of if I would keep the phone or not, but I think I will…I just can’t get enough of it…and not I have gone completely touch screen as this replaced my Nokia 5310 which was a great little phone! (not that I don’t plan to keep it just in case!!)

If I’ve missed anything you want me test to add or you have any feelings about the phone your self, please comment below.

p.s. I will see if I can do a camera comparison with my N900 asap so watch this space! You can see my X6 vs N900 camera comparison here: Camera: X6 vs N900

Some of you might have known that I was getting my hands on a Nokia X6 which arrived yesterday so I thought that I’d continue my tradition of firsts in the blogging world and kill 2 birds with one stone, so here is my first Unboxing and Stop Motion Video so enjoy!

Here are some stills of the phone and contents:

Just so you know I will be doing a proper review of the phone as well and you can expect that from me in a few days (hopefully).

The BH-905s were due in August, but reviews on it are harder to find than a lost contact lens. That or my Googlefu isn’t what it used to be.

NokNok.tv have had some hands on time with the BH-905s and found that “noise cancellation works exceedingly well” and that the sound quality was “nice and bassy with plenty of warmth to the audio quality.”

The BH-905′s have dedicated music controls, so you won’t need to navigate your phone to pause, stop, skip forward/backward tracks and adjust volume. You can even scroll within the track itself by holding the skip button.

As a headset, the BH-905′s are also for making/taking calls. NokNok found the call quality to be “stunning” , though reader Julian says, “when I try to speak to the caller, the headset picks up too much noise from the surround, thus the caller were having a hard time hearing me.”

An added plus of these headsets is that they aren’t only wireless. You can plug them into your 3.5mm jack or a multitude of other jacks as connectors are available. This helps to save battery life (up to 40h), which it needn’t do since it’s apparently “more than realistic”. Note the stated battery life below:

• Talk (Bluetooth): 24 h
• Music (Bluetooth): 25 h
• Talk (Bluetooth, with active noise cancellation): 15 h
• Music (Bluetooth, with active noise cancellation): 16 h
• Music (Wired, with active noise cancellation): 40 h
• Hands-free phone calls and music listening (without active noise cancellation) possible even with empty battery (wired connection)

The 600mAh battery supposedly takes 2h to charge via standard mini pin charger.

Via NokNok.tv

[If anyone knows a more in depth review, please link me up as I'd really want to know more about how good the audio quality is on this thing]

The BH-905 has active noise cancelling, containing 10 microphones of which 8 are used for extreme noise reduction.

The more common method of noise cancelling is passive, requiring a vacuum tight insulation to prevent sound. (In utmost basic terms) with active noise cancelling, as ambient sound is received through a microphone, a signal is generated to create interference which “cancels” out the ambient noise. Nokia’s previous headsets have had one speaker to do this – the BH-905 has 8 to further reduce the noise.

The other two microphones are for voice calls – which in addition to other 8 microphones for noise cancelling means that the receiver of your call should experience a crystal clear call with a lot of the ambient noise cut out. No more screaming down the phone because the environment around you is too loud.

Accessories: Nokia BH-905 – The ultimate headset?

If even £169.99 is a bit too pricey, you may want to consider the BH-604. Screaming in plastic so it isn’t as stylish as the BH-905s, nor can they match the noise cancellation or battery life. But it’s still an excellent stereo bluetooth headset, respectable audio quality and 14h battery life. Music controls and all for around £57.57. Shop around.

For more details, Ricky Cadden did a great Review of the BH-604 back April 08 over at MobileBurn

I would like to introduce My Nokia Blogs FIRST EVER podcast. I write that in bold letters just so you know, this was our first attempt, so sorry if some bits are a bit amateurish. Its quite hard when you are speaking over skype from halfway across the word and with no Script. This was recorded about a week ago, I just didnt have enough time to get it up as my internet connection died so I was using my 3 modem for a couple of days, and with an upload speed of 56k its not the best way to upload a 20mb file! Again sorry if its a little long and boring, but I promise we will have a plan for the next one .Anyway, if you have any suggestions or would like to make a guest appearance in the podcast (Cough Cough Mr James Burland hehe) then please email me at chaslam500 @yahoo.co.uk.