Nokia C6-01 review

Nokia C6-01 review: Media

The media capabilities of the Nokia C6-01 include the pre-installed Music Player, FM Radio, Picture Viewer and Video Viewer apps. These are accompanied by third-party web video applications including CNN, National Geographic, Movie Teasers, E! and YouTube.

When it comes to the Music Player app, the first thing you need to do is install Ovi Player or Ovi Suite onto your PC to aid in managing your music and its transfer to your phone.

Nokia does provide the option to copy music files onto the device and then select 'Sync Library' in the music player to import the transferred files into the music library, but using the PC applications for the file transfers is much simpler and more reliable.

The formats supported on the Nokia C6-01 are MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA, AMR-NB, AMR-WB.

One thing that should be noted is that music management is still a long way behind that of Apple iTunes and Microsoft Zune, although a great deal of progress can be seen between S60v5 and Symbian^3 devices.

The main limitation you will note is the lack of 'Album Artist' information and the inability to hide files, such as MP3 ringtones, recordings and alarms, that you do not wish to appear in the music player.

The FM Radio supports 87.5-108 MHz/76-90 MHz with RDS, relying on the headphone cables to act as the aerial. If you have around £45 burning a hole in your pocket you can purchase the Nokia Digital Radio Headset DAB and download the free supporting app via Software Update, although we have not tested this so cannot comment on its performance.

The Picture viewer app is well put together, although it has always seemed puzzling that videos are listed even though there is a separate video app -it's more of a gallery.

Within the app you can tag your images, and select to send single or multiple selected images via MMS or Bluetooth and direct link to the picture editor.

The video player supports H.264, MPEG-4, VC-1, H.263 (CIF 25fps), Real Video 10 (QVGA 25fps), ON2 VP6 (VGA 25fps), Flash video (VGA 25fps) and works well with no pixilation or judder during playback.

Disappointingly, the pre-installed YouTube app merely acts as a bookmark to the website, although there is a downloadable version of the app, which works as a fully fledged mobile client instead. Again, Nokia, would it be so hard to have this installed out of the box?

The C6-01 is another Symbian^3 device capable of replacing your phone, basic camera (no physical zoom here, remember), music machine and portable video player.