The Nokia X6 and Epic Music Phone Fail

So the Nokia X6 I have for review has already had a bit of a rough ride thanks to an unboxing video with Emu, but my look at the core function of the phone, how it works as a music device, has been pretty disappointing.

Yet again, the lack of joined up thinking from Nokia seems to be hurting a damn good product. Instead of just grafting on bits to an app that was pretty spiffy on the N95, they should have started again. If they were smart, the experience on the X6 would be very similar to the experience of the Ovi Music Player on your PC – as it is there are completely different methodologies at work between the two elements… the X6 plays music instantly and moves down a track listing, while the Ovi Player on the PC puts tracks in a “play queue” (like a temporary playlist) and you listen to that, not the next track on the album. Make your mind up Nokia!

The music application needs a lot of work to bring it up the expected standard in 2010. The annoying thing is that it is ‘close’ to brilliance, but to get those final few percentage points that make this a great app, and make the X6 a top notch music phone, that will require something more than bolting on a nice touch screen and adding in a few extra bits of code.

So yes, it works. But I was expecting more and I don’t think I’ll be alone in this. Frankly, Nokia should know by now that they can’t coast on past victories in their latest hardware.

The full review of the X6 music player is on All About Symbian. One final thought from me is that I think it’s just a shame that on a late night trip it crashed so often that I had to resort to my emergency iPod Nano. Hopefully the next firmware update will solve the memory issues.