Software
Being a Nokia phone, the X6 runs the Symbian Series 60 5th Edition OS also known as the Symbian^1 platform. It is basically the Series 60 3rd edition platform slightly redesigned for finger friendly touch input. We have come to know through experience that this really isn’t a good practice. Sure the S60v3 was good (for its time) but retrofitting it with touch support would cause a lot of hurdles in an overall smooth user experience.
Still considering that Symbian now competes in the mid-range to low-end markets, it is a very powerful smartphone operating system compared to the competitor offerings on devices like Samsung Star/Corby, or LG Arena, or even a full blown Samsung Bada OS. In fact thanks to its age, Symbian still has a lot of features that aren’t present in any other competing high-end platforms. The only real problem is that it has gotten too clunky and needs optimization, a newer cleaner UI and some powerful hardware under the hood.
While the X6 does have a capacitive touchscreen, Nokia (or rather Symbian^1) doesn’t do much to take advantage of that. There is no OS level gesture support like pinch-to-zoom, or rotate or any form of multitouch. The UI controls are also small and non-finger friendly at times. Specially the Nokia Web Browser. Thankfully, the X6 does have kinetic scrolling and this is one area where the capacitive touch screen shines.
Some nice additions to the system include a Quick Access Media key which opens a sliding menu with shortcuts to Music Player, Gallery, Video Center, Share Online and Web Browser.
Home Screen
While Symbian^1 still doesn’t support multiple home screens, it does have multiple themes for the Home Screen like the previous 3rd Edition. The X6 has three themes available which include, Contacts Bar, Shortcuts and Basic.
The top notification area is common to all the home screens and has three interactive hotspots. It shows the cellular signal to the far left with a clock right next to it. Tapping the clock opens the Clock application which is one nice and fast way to get to your alarms. The operator name is displayed in the middle with the currently active profile (or the current date) right below it. Tapping the Profile/Date indicator opens up a pop-up menu from where you can open the Calendar app or change the active profile. Towards the right are your usual indicators along with the battery meter. Tapping on the indicator opens up a notification menu which lists all the notifications (messages, emails, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, Headset etc) with one tap access to the respective applications.
The basic theme is, well pretty basic. You get two buttons for the Phone app and the Contacts app at the bottom of the screen, and the rest of the area is empty. While some people do prefer clean home screens, I like mine with lots and lots of widgets and info available at a glance.
The Shortcuts bar theme adds a shortcut bar to the top where you can pin up to 4 shortcuts to applications and bookmarks you access most often. The shortcuts bar should have been made scrollable, like the one you get in Series 40 devices. Even Series 60 3rd Ed. had 6 shortcut icons along with two shortcut buttons. Below the shortcut bar is the search widget. Tapping it opens the Search App where you can search information from your phone or the internet. Below Search is the Calendar widget which shows your upcoming events. A Music Player widget appears between Search and Calendar whenever a track is playing. At the bottom of the screen are two buttons for Phone app and Contacts.
The Contacts bar theme is a slightly modified (and downgraded) version of the Contacts Bar theme found on 5630 XpressMusic and 5730 XpressMusic. You get a scrollable bar up top where you can pin your favorite contacts with their pictures and an RSS Feed from a social network, a blog or anything else you can thing of. Tapping a contact opens up a popup where you can see the recent interaction history with the contact as well as two latest updates from his RSS Feed. You can actually add fake contacts for different websites you want to keep track of from your Home Screen.
Below the contacts bar is the Email widget which shows the most recent email and the number of unread emails in your default mailbox. A music player widget with some basic controls pops up below email whenever you are playing a tune. Far at the bottom is a 4-icon Shortcut bar and softkeys to access Phone and Contacts app. That’s about all the widgets you get on your Contacts Bar screen which is a step backwards from older devices where you also had Calendar, Wi-Fi, and Ovi Contacts widgets available.
If you ask me, the Contacts Bar theme is still the most usable of all the three themes even if it is the most resource intensive. You have one touch access to your favorite contacts as well as your email, at the expense of Search and Calendar of course.
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