Nokia's X6 reviewed: excellent battery life, but it's expensive

Despite what the ads might have you believe, the Nokia X6 is neither the slimmest nor the most sexy smartphone around. It's quite thick, measuring 15mm from front to back, and its chunky, candy bar chassis is mostly constructed of cheap-feeling plastic.

But beneath the dubious construction, this is a highly capable smartphone. It's the first phone we've seen from Nokia to boast a capacitive touchscreen - which, by the way, crams an impressive 360 x 640 resolution into its medium-sized 3.2in dimensions.

It features a 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, GPS, an FM tuner, high-speed HSDPA data connectivity and Wi-Fi, plus a massive 32GB of storage.

The phone produces good-quality photos, music sounds great through the supplied headset, and it comes with a year's subscription to Nokia's music download service, which gives you unlimited downloads for as long as your data allocation allows.

The touchscreen makes typing using the on-screen keyboard surprisingly easy, and even navigating around the phone's Symbian operating system - S60 fifth edition - is a reasonably straightforward process as a result.

The X6's battery life is right up there at the top of the tree too: it managed to retain an astonishing 90% after our 24-hour torture test. It's a highly capable all-round media phone.

But there are a couple of key areas where the X6 falls down, and the most crucial is performance. Nokia's web browser continues to let the side down, crashing during the Acid3 test and taking an average of 26 seconds to render the SMH homepage over Wi-Fi - that's way behind the iPhone and Android phones.

The phone feels sluggish in general use too; as soon as you have more than one application running at the same time it slows to a crawl. And Nokia's Ovi application store simply can't compete with the best that the rest have to offer either.

There's no denying the Nokia X6 is a tempting offering. It comes with free music for a year, boasts great media playback, superb battery life, a good camera and a strong core specification. But its performance - coupled with a pretty high price - means the X6 falls behind the best on test this month.

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