Review: Nokia C6 Part 2: Multimedia and Camera

In this part of the review, we'll look at the Nokia C6's complement of multimedia software. S60 veterans won't find anything new with the C6's multimedia support. However, what will come as a pleasant surprise, especially given the budget nature of the C6, is that a running theme of the C6 is speedy operation, with little or no waiting for operations such as gallery thumbnail viewing or music library refreshing.

Music and Podcasting

The C6 comes with the standard S60 5th Edition Music application. The first screen offers links into sub-applications for audio playback. The first of which is of course the main Music player. This is followed by a link to Nokia's "Ovi Music" store, allowing users to purchase either individual tracks or whole albums for direct delivery to their phone. However, Ovi Music still sells music with DRM, something I hope Nokia will move away from as soon as is practical. Finally, there is the radio receiver application; as ever though, a wired headset is required to act as an antenna. Also disappointing here is the lack of any internet radio application for streaming audio from the internet. This isn't specific to the C6, as Internet Radio has been missing from all of Nokia's S60 5th Edition (and some Eseries 3rd Edition) devices.

The standard Nokia Podcasting application is supplied with the C6, and is integrated into the Music application, being shown along side the other categories. Those being: Artists, Albums, Playlists, 'All songs', Genres and Composers. However, more advanced users might like to try out the Podcatcher application that is being designed for Symbian^3, and back ported to Symbian^1, as it has a more up to date and relevant content discovery system (at least for the technologically inclined!).

The S60 Music player application has been justly criticised for being slow and unreliable to build its music library (based on tagged music files loaded by the user). In testing with other flagship S60 5th Edition phones I've found that even scrolling through long lists of artists or albums has often been a stuttering experience. However, the experience with the C6 is consistently fluid. The library is updated speedily, and scrolling through lists is smooth and fast - top marks for user experience here.

As mentioned in part one of this review, the C6 has a single speaker on its back. It has a decent volume and is (subjectively) fine for casual listening to podcasts and background music.

Viewing and sharing of photos and videos

The C6 comes with S60's standard photo gallery application, and Nokia Share Online for publishing content to the web. Share Online is still only supplied with the same old three services as with other Nokia devices (i.e. Flickr, Ovi & Vox). However, free plugins by Furtiv are available via the Ovi Store for a wide range of other social networks and sharing services (e.g. Facebook, Twitpic, Picasa, YouTube, etc.).

The theme of speed continues with the photo gallery application. Even when the C6 has hundreds of photos to present thumbnails of, it does so in short order, and seems able to generate thumbnails on the fly while performing fast kinetic scrolling without stuttering. This is a big improvement, particularly when compared against the N97. Also, zooming and panning on individual photos (subjectively at least) feels faster on the C6 than with most other devices.

From the thumbnail view, there are toolbar touch buttons for sending photos via messaging, flagging photos for bulk operations, and for launching Share Online. More operations are available from the options menu, such as tagging photos with keywords and launching the photo editor. The S60 photo editor is familiar but quite versatile, providing the following functions: brightness adjust, contrast adjust, sharpness adjust, down scaling, cropping, rotate, speech bubble insert, insert clip art, overlay text, Posterise, overlaying a frame, Red-eye reduction, black and white, Sepia, and 'Vivid' colour.

A confusing aspect of the S60 gallery application is that videos are not just shown in the "Video and TV" application, but they are also shown in the photo gallery application. There is very limited video editing capability too. The video editor just has the capability to add text, trim, merge and replace sound. In the following section, readers will find a YouTube video that was completely edited together on the C6.

The dedicated video gallery is an application called "Video & TV", as found on the N97 and N97 mini. However, this would imply that there is some sort of content delivery system for TV programmes, which there is not. While the N97 was officially supported by the BBC iPlayer application, and it was possible to install the same on the N97 mini, the C6 is not supported at all. The Video & TV application starts with three options: "Last watched", "My video clips" and "Video feeds". The first is self explanatory, and the latter takes the user to the Ovi Store video department. Going into 'My video clips' presents a list of categories: 'All video clips', 'Downloads', 'Captured video clips', and 'Other'. This is fine, although the rhyme and reason as to what goes where isn't clear. Captured videos are the only videos that do seem to go where one might expect. Videos downloaded via the Ovi Store appear only in the 'All video clips' list, not in the Downloads list as might be assumed. It seems that the only content that appears in the Download category are videos downloaded with the standard Nokia Podcasting application. These inconsistencies aren't unique to the C6, they apply across all recent Symbian^1 devices.

Video playback on the C6 is generally good. All of my transcoded for Symbian test video files play smoothly with the C6 (that is, MPEG4 at 480kbps, with 128kbps MP3 audio). The 3.2" screen and passable audio output make the C6 a reasonable personal media player, although this is an activity that shouldn't be undertaken if it isn't possible to recharge the C6, as video playback will quickly draw down the 1200mAh battery.

Camera

Stills

The C6 has a 5 megapixel auto focus camera. Within the C6's budgetary scope, the camera has unbranded optics, and a single LED flash (not that dual LED's are that much better!) Therefore the camera is by no means one of the C6's major selling points. However, in tests for this review, the C6's camera produced better than expected results. The C6's autofocus system even copes well with close-up (macro) photography, capturing an impressive amount of detail. This just goes to show how mature Nokia's image processing software has now become, which benefits all devices.

The user interface for the camera is standard for Symbian^1 devices. The most common features are overlayed in a finger-friendly grid of icons. These give access to: Scene mode, Video mode, Show Grid (to aid composition, e.g. rule of thirds), Self-timer, Colour Tone, White balance, Exposure, Light Sensitivity (ISO level), Contrast, Sharpness, Sequence mode, and a short-cut to the photo gallery. More functions, including settings menu and flash control are accessed via on-screen buttons down the right-hand side of the screen. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a panoramic image capture mode for the C6. On the bright side, the C6 does support geo-tagging photos via its AGPS system.

There are some criticisms to make of the C6's camera system. First, and most importantly, is that the C6 has a simple TFT screen with no transflective layer, along with a resistive touch layer. This makes it almost impossible to use the C6 as an outdoors camera. Even on a dull day as shown in the example pictures below, the C6 screen was highly reflective. Secondly, the camera application is relatively slow to load. From first pressing the shutter key and launching the application, it takes around 3-4 seconds until photos can be taken. It doesn't sound much but it is noticeable when you want to take a photo right away. Third and finally, after a photo has been taken, there is the usual preview of the photo, along with some text indicating that the photo is being processed. However, I found that even after the processing notice had gone, I would get a "Camera in use" error if I tried to delete the photo. I would have to wait over 5 seconds longer than the apparent processing time before the image could be deleted.

Here are some sample pictures taken on the C6:

The full gallery of my C6 test shots can be found here, and for readers who would like to compare the C6 to other Nokia flagship devices, please follow the links for my N97 test gallery and my N97 mini test gallery.

Video

The video capture user interface is similarly laid out to that in still capture mode. However, the main functions menu has less options, only having: Scene mode, Image Mode, White Balance, Colour Tone, and a short-cut to the photo gallery.

Video capture on the C6 is mediocre. Even though the camera module has an autofocus system, video capture has no autofocus or pre-focus, instead focusing on infinity. Resolution goes up to VGA (640x480), but options for wide screen (640x352) and MMS friendly (176x144 in H.263) video are available.

Videos captured with VGA width are encoded in MPEG4 with a minimum of 15 frames per second. However, the C6 will produce adequate results for the likes of YouTube and Facebook, but don't rely on this phone for important video capture, such as special events. Again, with the budgetary considerations of the C6, being a primary video capture device is most definitely not its modus operandi. Here's an example video that was filmed and edited together on the C6.

Coming up next

In the next part of this review, we'll be looking at the user experience of the Nokia C6, along with its application suite.

David Gilson, All About Symbian, 12th August 2010

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Review Discussion

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unregistered So nice review has been produced Shutting d mouths of its critics abt CPU speed

I imagine some of the work done for ^3 is filtering back down to ^1 phones. The 5800 V51 upgrade seems to have received some of these improvements too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by talhamid "So nice review has been produced Shutting d mouths of its critics abt CPU speed" You don't even know what 'fast' is if your usage has been restricted to Nokia touchscreen phones. Though, it's not JUST about CPU speed - it is also about an OS that's not hobbled by its own legacy.

That's very presumtious.

There was a problem previously when there were a lot of images/songs/media items that needed to be enumerated for display in the gallery type screens. This seems to have been optimised, I think proving the old developers practice of optimising before scaling hardware is always the best route.

Fast is only as fast as is necessary. Symbian isn't hobbled by its own legacy, that is ensured by QT and the back-compatibility break with Symbian^4. I have been using Android and iPhone and these make the 5800 seem a bit slow. Not as slow as the iPhone 3G can be though. But that's OK. It's not a Nokia, slow is OK on non-Nokias.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tenkom It's not just about ui speed. A faster cpu would allow 720p video recording and playback, faster web page rendering, better games and even better battery life. yes, the newer,faster chipsets used in modern smartphones like iphone4, samsung galaxy s and so on, even though they have higher clockspeeds, are more battery efficient than the old arm11 crap used by nokia. Want proof? Look at the iphone 3g vs the 3gs. Same battery, same os, but the 3gs has better battery life. Admittedly it's not a huge difference but still.

Not exactly proof, but an indication of how things are on the iPhone. I found that both the 3G and the 3GS both had fantastic battery life just as long as you didn't try to unlock the screen and use it. If you did then it would almost visibly drain. Like having a heavy car with a 6 litre V8 engine.

http://www.glbenchmark.com/compare.j...Phone%203G%20S

This is all the proof you need - to realise that the N8 despite it's ARM11 core, still beats the crap out of the 3GS.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tenkom It's not just about ui speed. A faster cpu would allow 720p video recording and playback, faster web page rendering, better games and even better battery life. yes, the newer,faster chipsets used in modern smartphones like iphone4, samsung galaxy s and so on, even though they have higher clockspeeds, are more battery efficient than the old arm11 crap used by nokia. Want proof? Look at the iphone 3g vs the 3gs. Same battery, same os, but the 3gs has better battery life. Admittedly it's not a huge difference but still.

Quote:

Originally Posted by snoFlake @davidgilson I may be wrong (but of course as a forum poster I don't think/won't accept I am) but I don't think that the current version of the BBC iPlayer is a specialist application unlike the one as originally installed on the N97 classic and mini. The current version on my N97 is nothing more than a glorified bookmark (bit like the iPhone one although not sure whether the URL it points too is optimised for S^x like the iOSx one) which opens up the web browser. So it's as easy(ish) just to navigate to iPlayer from the BBC homepage (either mobile or full web) which is why the "App" is so small. this would tie in with the BBC's expressed dissatisfaction at the number of (new) platforms it was looking at having to develop for and platform fragmentation and would seem to be part of their future plans leading us all to an app free HTML5 wonderland I suppose, and no bad thing. Hence the iPlayer should easily be available for the C6 through OVI (if it's not very silly oversight to not include it on "compatible" device list) I can't see what's not to support as it's web standards. Although as I haven't a C6 can't confirm and as I'm so delighted with the performance of my magnificent, all conquering, trouble free N97 I probably won't be getting one.

The iPlayer on Nokia is a WRT Web Widget (not a home screen widget), and it's not just a bookmark to a web page (like on iPhone) as this would not work the same way because there needs to be specific code to handle DRM and allow downloading and storage of time-bombed downloaded files.

These downloaded files are wonderful because they work anywhere. No annoying connectivity problems.

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisq My gallery on N97 has almost 200 pictures and kinetic scrolling is super fluid. In fact, it's much better than in the rest of the UI.

yes it looks lovely, etc, etc - (I am guessing it is similar to that on 5800??) no thought about whether it does it's job properly, though???
Not just to display pics, but to display a group of pics that you **want** !!!

If you are a normal horny guy, you will have some comical adult pics to laugh at with your mates!!

- you will also have some nice pics of your hols to show your mum, and some real estate pics to show a client....

The problem with the 'gallery' is that it just grabs ALL the pics, in ALL drives, and shows them all....
so the pic of your mate throwing up, will be right next to the pic of a premium property... :frown: :frown: a bit shocking for your client!!:o

Quote:

Originally Posted by comnut yes it looks lovely, etc, etc - (I am guessing it is similar to that on 5800??) no thought about whether it does it's job properly, though??? Not just to display pics, but to display a group of pics that you **want** !!! If you are a normal horny guy, you will have some comical adult pics to laugh at with your mates!! - you will also have some nice pics of your hols to show your mum, and some real estate pics to show a client.... The problem with the 'gallery' is that it just grabs ALL the pics, in ALL drives, and shows them all.... so the pic of your mate throwing up, will be right next to the pic of a premium property... :frown: :frown: a bit shocking for your client!!:o

No. N97/ N97 Mini/ C6/ N8 have totally different gallery than 5800/X6.
Captured pics are in 'Captured', the rest sits in 'Downloaded' or 'Albums' If you care to sort them. You can also view them by 'Month'. 5800's gallery is very basic in comparison.

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisq My gallery on N97 has almost 200 pictures and kinetic scrolling is super fluid. In fact, it's much better than in the rest of the UI.

I just wish they'd ship the beta labs photo viewer application - looks massively better than any other part of the Symbian UI, is fluid, beautiful to use ....

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisq Captured pics are in 'Captured', the rest sits in 'Downloaded' or 'Albums' If you care to sort them.

but what about the 1000's of pics you have copied from your previous phone, and have used windows to neatly organize them into various folders??? many other phones respect that file structure, while also doing a good slide show using it....

I dont fancy spending hours 'album-izing' them using a pin on a tiny screen, especially if those markers are destroyed when I use my card reader to import a few more...

Quote:

Originally Posted by comnut but what about the 1000's of pics you have copied from your previous phone, and have used windows to neatly organize them into various folders??? many other phones respect that file structure, while also doing a good slide show using it.... I dont fancy spending hours 'album-izing' them using a pin on a tiny screen, especially if those markers are destroyed when I use my card reader to import a few more...

It's a shame that no matter how you organize your photos in Ovi Suite, the albums/folders will not transfer to the phone the way you organized it. You still have to manually organize it on the phone. :( ..... 5230 user

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