We all know about Nokia, the worldwide leader in the mobile phone and the smartphone market who no body cares about. They might have a strong lineup of low cost, low margin devices but that doesn’t mean you would get all the hype from the media. In fact the only remaining players in the books of most tech media outlets are Apple, and Google’s Android camp. If your device isn’t running iOS or some version of Android (God knows how many there are), chances are no body would even remember its name.

Still all that doesn’t mean there aren’t other platforms out there which might be aging but still have juice left in them. Symbian is one of them. More specifically, Symbian^1 which debuted with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was Nokia’s attempt at trying to get a foothold in the market of touch based devices dominated by the iPhone and later by Android. Unfortunately for Nokia, they do have a habit of making half cooked devices. The 5800 was handicapped by its hardware limitations (like the resistive touchscreen) and software issues (lack of kinetic scrolling for example). The overall experience wasn’t as smooth as you would get on an iPhone at that time even though you had way more features like multitasking, MMS, Copy/Paste, video recording and a ton of others. But one of things the 5800 got right was its value as a product – having good features at an affordable price turned out some decent sales for the device.

Fast forward a year and Nokia was all set to take things further by evolving the 5800 into a more modern product. In order to make the handset more appealing, Nokia ditched their conventional naming scheme for the XpressMusic lineup and introduced X Series – a whole new line of entertainment centric devices. They also added a capacitive touch screen and a large built-in memory and a better camera to the 5800 and wrapped it in a more attractive and slimmer design. Unfortunately, the upgrade also meant nearly twice the price compared to the previous flagship 5800.

Fortunately, Nokia was quick to rectify that by introducing a slightly tuned down model lowering the price a great deal. The Nokia X6 16GB now competes with the likes of Nokia N97 mini, Sony Ericsson Vivaz, LG Arena, HTC Hero and HTC Wildfire. Not to mention there is another 8GB model coming that would pit it against low end touchscreen devices like the Nokia 5530 and Samsung Corby/Star lineup. But the question is, how good of a phone is Nokia X6? Is it worth the price? Is it really a step forward? Hop over into the next page to find out.

But before you do that, here is a quick rundown of the specifications.