Nokia C6 Improves On The Successful 5800 Xpress Music

It is not surprising for the Finnish mobile phone leader Nokia to rehash its highly successful 5800 XpressMusic smartphone, update some of its features and slap a full QWERTY slider. Apart from its outstanding features when it came out in November 2008, the new Nokia C6 is sure to delight segments of the market that want 5800 functionality but with tactile QWERTY keyboard.

Sharing the same hardware and software platform, the new slider handset gets a better camera, more preloaded messaging apps and a slightly better onboard memory than on the 5800.

Shared 5800 Features

Powered by a 434 MHz ARM11 processor used in the 5800 and running the same Symbian OS v9.4 layered with the S60 Rel 5.0 user interface, the Nokia C6 has nothing new nor outstanding to boast other than the proven capability you can expect from a Nokia.

It sports the same 3.2-inch TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with half-VGA resolution and 16 million color depth. XpressMusic entertainment legacy is all over to make the Nokia C6 no less than a competent music phone.

It has the same stereo FM receiver with RDS and the media players for audio in the MP3, WMA, WAV, and eAAC+ file formats as well as video in the MP4, H.264 and WMV file codecs.

You have the option for wired stereo listening using its 3.5mm audio out jack or go wireless with its Bluetooth A2DP support. Its 1200 mAh li-ion battery allows 30 hours of continuous music playback on a single charge. But it loses the TV-out feature on the 5800.

Updated Features

The Nokia C6 offers the same wealth of radio and data connectivity technologies that gets a slight update over the 5800. Where the 5800 was a dual band 3G, the C6 is a quad band on the UMTS (850/ 900/ 1900/2100).

It is also a quad band GSM (850/ 900/ 1800/ 2100) on 2G. Data speeds get the same class 32 GPRS/EDGE for up to 286 Kbps on 2G while 3G data speeds get HSDPA at 3.6 Mbps and HSUPA at 2 Mbps.

It retains the WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 local connectivity features. SatNav is likewise there from its in-built GPS radio with A-GPS support.

Onboard memory enjoys a better spec at 240 MB supplemented with microSD external memory expandability up to 16 GB. Its battery yields a shorter talk times at 7 hours on 2G, 5 hours on 3G and standby times of 384 hours on either.

In the imaging department, it gets better from a camera with a 5-megapixel resolution and enjoying the same 5800 imaging features such as LED flash, face/smile detection, geo tagging and video capture at VGA resolution and 30fps. It also comes with front-facing secondary camera for 3G video calls.

Software-wise, it has native support for Instant Messaging with Windows Live, Google talk and Yahoo Messenger. HTML browsing supports the newer Adobe Flash Lite v3.1 as well as RSS feeds. A document viewer is added for PDF and MS Office files are also preloaded.