Media
The Nokia X6 is a media centric device so naturally, this is one department where it should overshadow the competition. The humongous built in storage (for the 16GB and 32GB versions at least) is more than enough for your media consumption needs. I was able to fit my entire desktop playlist with about a 1000 tracks that takes about 7.3GB. I could have even fit my entire music library which goes over 17GB if I had the 32GB unit to test. The X6 also ships with Comes with Music in select markets so you have unlimited access to tracks on the Ovi Music Store.
The Music Player itself was the standard one you have seen in the XpressMusic lineup as of late. You can categories tracks by Artist, Album, Playlist, Composer, and Genre. You can also listen to Podcasts you have downloaded. The player comes with six equalizer presets, but you can create your own if you feel the need. The X6 has two loudspeakers for stereo output, which were among the best ones I’ve seen err.. heard in a phone as of late.
Audio quality is very subjective and everyone perceives it differently. With that Said I was completely blown away by the quality of the X6’s audio output specifically from the headset bundled. The bundled headset was the Nokia WH-701 ear buds and not the WH-500 the X6 usually ships with. I can only imagine what the quality would be if I tried it with that headset which usually costs as much as $100 in some markets.
Radio on the X6 was a different story altogether. For starters, the Radio application only supports FM Radio with RDS. There is no Internet Radio built into the X6 which is present in many lower priced XpressMusic devices. On top of that, station discovery usually didn’t work on the X6 even though the 5630 on my other hand was picking them up without an issue.
The X6 carries a rather unique application called Playlist DJ. The App scans your music library and automagically generates a playlist depending on your mood which you can set with the help of four parameters. These include Joy, Romance, Anger, and Tempo. Changing the values of these sliders dynamically alters the playlist. Alternatively, you can also select a track and generate a playlist of similar tracks based on the previously stated four parameters. The app actually works and results were pretty satisfying.
As for Video, the 16:9 3.2 inch screen is particularly great. Sure its not as large as the ones you’d find on many devices these days, but it is still big enough to watch videos from YouTube (or whatever source you like) on the road. The phone supports H.264 out of the box so you can get high quality videos in decent file sizes. Other supported formats include MPEG4-V, WMV, H.263, Real Media and 3GP.
The phone actually comes with two bundled video applications. The first one is Nokia’s Video Center which is like a media gallery for Videos. You can browse through all the videos on your device as well as download them from the internet. Playing a video file launches the bundled RealPlayer application, which is well… a video player that Just Works™.
As for the viewing experience, like I said the 3.2 inch screen does help and is seems to be just big enough to give a pleasurable viewing experience. I decided to test the video capabilities by copying a season of Supernatural on the device. The videos from my PC (with a resolution 624x352) didn’t require downsizing thanks to the resolution of X6. In fact the videos slightly had to be zoomed to fit the X6’s resolution of 640x360. The experience was satisfying enough that I ended up watching the entire season on the device.
The only thing hampering the near perfect multimedia experience of the X6 was the lack of DLNA support and the Home Media application I’ve become so fond of on my 5630 XpressMusic and Windows 7 powered home network. The ability to stream media to and from any DLNA compatible device is just too much to live without once you get used to it. I have no idea why Nokia decided to exclude DLNA support from X6 even though it is present in older devices.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
