Introduction
Don't let your E71/72 smartphone read this. No, it won't have a heart attack or anything. But you don't want it suddenly feeling sad and useless. You certainly realize the E71/E72 duo is getting old and rusty. Like it or not, it's time to move on.
The Nokia E6 will not take No for an answer. A super crisp VGA touchscreen, the finessed Symbian Anna, the strong messenger bloodline and the stainless steel armor are a tempting combination. The package will make long-time Eseries users feel right at home and cheer the upgrades.
Nokia E6 official photos
Touchscreen or D-pad is not a decision you're forced to make. It will come naturally instead. Where the small screen won't allow the required level of touch precision, the D-pad will fill in. Five homescreen panes to fill with shortcuts and widgets will do better than the good old Active Standby with alternative setups for business and leisure.
Most importantly though, to even the most old-school of Eseries loyalists, touchscreen will be a fair price to pay for finally upping the screen resolution to acceptable levels.
Key features
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- Penta-band 3G with 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA
- Symbian Anna OS
- Messenger bar, stainless steel body, four-row QWERTY keyboard
- 2.46" 16M-color capacitive TFT touchscreen of 640 x 480 pixel resolution; Gorilla glass protection
- 680 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 256 MB RAM
- 8GB internal storage, 1GB ROM, microSD card slot
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
- Digital compass
- 8 megapixel fixed-focus camera with dual-LED flash, 720p video recording @ 25fps; geotagging, face detection, smart zoom in video
- Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
- Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
- Stereo FM Radio with RDS
- microUSB port, USB-on-the-go
- Flash and Java support for the web browser
- Stereo Bluetooth 3.0
- Smart dialing and voice commands
- DivX, XviD and Matroska video support
- Social network integration
- Office document viewer and editor
- Excellent battery life
- Excellent audio quality
Main disadvantages
- Symbian Anna is still catching up with Android and iOS
- The tiny touchscreen has no room for big fingers
- Fixed-focus camera
- Relatively limited 3rd party software availability
This phone seems to have almost everything - well, save for HDMI and an actual life-size touchscreen. But we're talking Eseries and the E6 is the business. It feels like Nokia really wanted to rekindle the magic. The E6 makes the E72 look like a routine, cursory attempt at an update. Where the E72 wanted quietly keep on cashing in, the E6 is keen to make a difference. A tall task indeed, considering the times.
Design and construction
The E6 is a looker - in the traditionally sober, understated style of the Eseries. The premium materials and high build quality go without saying.
We had the chance to use both the black and silver version for our review. There should be a white paint job available too. A limited but carefully chosen selection, considering the target audience.
The front of the black Nokia E6 tends to get all smudgy, while the silver variety is good at hiding fingerprints.
At the rear, the battery cover and camera deck are made of metal, with bits of matt plastic top and bottom.
The landscape 2.46" 16M-color capacitive touchscreen of VGA (640 x 480) resolution takes almost half of the phone’s face. We never missed an opportunity to slate the Eseries messengers for their poor QVGA screens. Even in their prime, they were put to shame by BlackBerries. The E6 will have no more of that.
A VGA screen with a 2.46" diagonal has higher pixel density than the iPhone 4’s Retina display: 326ppi for the Retina and 328ppi for the Nokia E6.
The capacitive screen of the Nokia E6 is as responsive as they come. It is quick to register even the slightest of touches and even pinch zooming is enabled (in the gallery and web browser). Viewing angles are quite good, the colors vivid.
Here's the table with our brightness measurements. You can learn more about the test here.
| Display test | 50% brightness | 100% brightness | ||||
| Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | Black, cd/m2 | White, cd/m2 | |||
| LG Optimus Black P970 | 0.27 | 332 | 1228 | 0.65 | 749 | 1161 |
| Nokia X7 | 0 | 365 | ∞ | 0 | 630 | ∞ |
| Motorola Atrix 4G | 0.48 | 314 | 652 | 0.60 | 598 | 991 |
| Apple iPhone 4 | 0.14 | 189 | 1341 | 0.39 | 483 | 1242 |
| HTC Sensation | 0.21 | 173 | 809 | 0.61 | 438 | 720 |
| Samsung I9000 Galaxy S | 0 | 263 | ∞ | 0 | 395 | ∞ |
| Sony Ericsson XPERIA Arc | 0.03 | 34 | 1078 | 0.33 | 394 | 1207 |
| Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II | 0 | 231 | ∞ | 0 | 362 | ∞ |
| Nokia E6 | 0.52 | 757 | 1456 | 0.57 | 1004 | 1631 |
Our dedicated brightness test confirmed our observations and showed that the Nokia E6 screen is really bright. In fact it's the brightest unit we have seen, dethroning the LG Optimus Black. Its blacks, on the other hand, aren't the deepest we have seen, but they are okay for the LCD league. This means that the overall contrast is, among the best we have seen from an LCD.
Something else that the test shows is that the E6 brightness setting has little effect on the actual brightness of the screen. You can see that the difference between the 100% and 50% settings is minimal.
The D-pad is welcome when you need to hit small links on websites - and it is perfectly usable to navigate the menus. You can pretend there's no touchscreen if you want. Just one thing: a trackpad would've made quite a lot of sense – especially in the web browser. The touchscreen is fine but they didn't get rid of the D-pad. Could've easily used the E72 combo and thrown in a trackpad.
Make sure you're comfortable with the screen size
Just above the screen we find the earpiece, a bunch of sensors and the video-call camera.
Underneath the screen is a spacious navigation deck built around a reasonably tactile and palpably raised D-pad. Call and End knobs are on both ends of the deck, the One Touch keys closer to the D-pad. Soft keys are moved over to the screen. The One Touch keys have the usual varying short press / long press functionality.
The video-call camera, earpiece and light sensor above the screen • A spacious navigation pad under the display
The QWERTY keyboard is virtually the same as those on the E5 and C3. The keys are reasonably sized and spaced, with good press feedback. They do feel just a tad softer than the E71 but other than that you shouldn’t have any problems.
The right side of the Nokia E6 is quite crowded. The volume rocker is on top, with an extra key squeezed in for activating voice commands (long press) and the voice recorder (short press). Just below is the typical Nokia lock slider.
There is also a lanyard eyelet at bottom end of the right side.
The lock slider has another job too: it turns on the Dual-LED flash to serve as a flashlight. You just slide down and hold.
The left side's only feature is the microUSB port covered with a small plastic lid. There is USB charging and USB-on-the-go functionality provided by the port.
Under the metal cover is the 1500 mAh Li-Ion BL-4D battery, which powers the Nokia E6. The battery is quoted at up to 672 hours of stand-by in a 2G network or up to 14 hours and 40 minutes of talk-time. Nokia is quick to call it one of the best performers on the market. In real life, the battery lasted two and a half days of really heavy usage: playing videos and music, continuous Wi-Fi connection and 3G data transfers, browsing, social networking, document editing, heavy camera action, etc.Symbian Anna brings new icons and refreshed homescreen
The Nokia E6 and X7 are the first devices to have Symbian Anna out of the box. The new release takes the OS to the next level with a more user-friendly and contemporary user interface, an improved web browser, new split-screen for text input and a better homescreen.
Starting with the homescreen, Anna is showing its fresh coat of polish and a new feature here or there. The homescreen of the E6 consists of five panes, which you can fill up with various widgets (and shortcuts) and reshuffle as you see fit. You can add or delete panes but you don’t get more than five.
The homescreen scrolling has been vastly improved - the panes move with your finger, not after you've done the swipe as it was in Symbian^3.The menu is mostly unchanged, retaining the hierarchical folder structure, but the icons are new - they are now rounded squares. It's an aesthetic change mostly
You are free to rearrange icons as you see fit so you might go for placing them all in the main folder and get a flat-ish menu system. You can create custom folders too, which can help you organize your apps. A list view mode is also available but that involves much more scrolling and that’s why we preferred to leave things in grid.
The task manager shows screenshots of the running apps, instead of just icons. You also need only a single click to kill them. The downside is the task manager manages to only fit three apps on the screen and you often have to scroll to the one you want.
The slide naturally locks or unlocks the screen but if you hold it down you'll turn on the flashlight. The same action will turn it off.
The Nokia E6 handles very well but Symbian Anna brings no bump in performance compared to Symbian^3, the Anna release is more of a feature, rather than a performance update. Although heavy multi-taskers will frown at the 256MB of RAM we didn’t get any “Out of memory” errors even with a couple of RAM-intensive apps running in the background.
Symbian Anna is definitely a step in the right direction, but we're afraid the competition has zoomed far ahead. While Apple and Google are trying to outdo each other with all sorts of user interface innovation, Symbian has just caught up with a few years ago.
One positive change is that there's always a Back virtual key visible, which makes navigating apps simpler.
On the other hand, the Options menu still relies on the menu/submenu structure, which is a relic of the non-touch days of Symbian and is begging to be changed to an Android-like solution (menu key that shows a panel with 6-8 buttons for the most common options, maybe a More button if you really want to dig into the settings).
Ovi Store for Symbian
Symbian is still one of the most popular smartphone OSes in the world but its application store is pretty barren compared to the two juggernauts, the iOS App Store and Android's Market.
The company has refreshed their Ovi store interface to make it more user-friendly for Symbian^3 and it's what you get on Anna too. And while the UI is indeed very handy to use, the number of apps is somewhat of a problem.
The default screen shows a list of featured apps or you can browse the apps available in the Ovi Store by categories – Applications, Games, Audio and Video content, Personalization; or by collections – Summer Gift of Games, Chat Collection, Apps Start Kit, Travel, Tools for Professionals and Apps for Kids are the collections available at the time of this writing.
Your account profile keeps record of all the apps you have installed under My stuff. You can now also select where games and apps should be installed and where audio and video should go. That’s nice – we wish Android had that right from the start.
Free GPS navigation
The Nokia E6 comes with a built-in GPS receiver, which managed to get a satellite lock from a cold start (A-GPS turned off) in a little under two minutes. You also have A-GPS for getting a faster lock or use Cell-ID/Wi-Fi positioning if you don’t need the accuracy.
As you probably know since the start of the year Nokia made their Ovi Maps navigation free for all their smartphones, which naturally includes the E6. The voice guidance is currently available in over 70 countries and over 40 different languages, with even traffic information for more than 10 of those.
In addition, Nokia did a pretty decent job of the Ovi Maps application itself, blessing it with a cool, touch-friendly interface, as well as nice features such as the Lonely Planet city guide, HRS hotels and the Michelin restaurant guide. There's also an Event guide that lists all that’s happening within a 3km range of your position.
With Ovi Maps 3.06 you get three different view modes including satellite and terrain maps. Those however do need an internet connection. The more regular 2D and 3D view modes are also at hand and can be used with preloaded maps. Pinch zooming and downloading maps straight to the phone via Wi-Fi work like a charm here.
Updating Ovi Maps if it doesn’t come with the latest version out of the box is quite worthwhile.
Ovi Maps gives you free lifetime voice-guided navigation over the excellent Navteq maps
The route planning algorithm is also rather easy to customize to best suit your preferences. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided and so can tunnels and ferries. Routes can be set to either fastest or shortest.
Ovi Maps is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can switch the GPS receiver off and use the phone as a hand-held map.
Final words
It's been almost two years since the E72 was keen to stress it was business as usual for the Eseries. It now seems like an eternity. A few iPhone versions and Android releases later, the business is not what it used to be and Nokia have been learning it the hard way. Tablets are all over the place, dual-core’s in charge and even BlackBerry want a piece of the touchscreen pie.
What about the Eseries? Well, they’ve been trying to adapt. The neat and reliable E5 is the younger, friendlier face of the Eseries, affordable and social. The E7 is the usual solid job, which, under different circumstances, could’ve been a flagship to fear and respect. Nokia have been trying to keep up with the rest to the best of their ability. Symbian Anna lifts their game and some of their recent phones look to win back some of the lost pride.
The E6 is called to take over from the E72, connect the dots between the past and the present. The Eseries spirit is so intact it leaves a major upgrade somewhat in the shade. The screen makes quite a difference - mostly for the bump in resolution, less so for actually being a touchscreen.
We should note though, that the latest Symbian Anna helps appreciate the QWERTY/touchscreen combo. And the improved media package makes the E6 a better entertainer than its Eseries predecessors. The new Symbian browser is another point in favor. It’s the browser too – along with text editors – that makes the D-pad a credible addition to the multi-touch enabled capacitive touchscreen.
Keyboard and touchscreen is a combination that works and one that Nokia has already tried in the sweet little X3-02 Touch and Type. It’s not alien to a smartphone context either: from olden-day PocketPCs to messenger droids in the bar form factor.
Even RIM are giving it a try with the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900. We’re looking forward to yet another chapter of the Eseries rivalry with BlackBerry when the Bold Touch is released this September. The latest RIM invention is based on the BlackBerry OS 7.0, runs on a 1.2GHz processor (double the clock speed of the E6), has the same high-res touchscreen but slightly bigger and an optical trackpad.
Anyway, it was time for the Eseries to move on and Nokia couldn’t have done better than the E6. With phones like the N8, N9 and the X7, Nokia is busy showing us they still have it in them. The E6 has nothing to be ashamed of in this company. Is this enough for it to hope to leave a footprint the size of the E71? Probably not. No one knows that better than Nokia themselves. They deal with the message rather than kill the messenger.
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