Nokia C6 review

The 1200 mAh battery in the Nokia C6 is smaller than you would generally get in smartphones, and it really shows.

Though Nokia suggest up to 11 hours of talk time and 400 hours of standby, we think it's probably being a bit ambitious, particularly in talk time.

Frankly, the C6's battery life is one of its biggest weaknesses. When we did our camera testing, we had about half a charge showing upon leaving the house. Granted, we had the screen on a lot for the next few minutes, we took over 20 pictures and a few videos, and we made on phone call for five minutes.

When we got back, the phone gave us a low battery alert. We'd only been out for an hour or so.

Similarly, on days we weren't doing heavy testing of the phone, it wouldn't make through 48 hours without a charge. On similarly light days, even an iPhone 3GS can go for longer than that.

These days, the tenet is that smartphones need charging every day. In most cases, you can get away with not doing this, but we'd say it's vital in using the Nokia C6.

Connectivity

With HSDPA and Wi-Fi ready to handle your wireless data needs, there's plenty of speedy connectivity on offer.

We had no problems configuring the C6 to get straight onto our WPA2-encrypted wireless router. There's a Home screen widget for monitoring your Wi-Fi connection, if that's important to you.

Otherwise, delve into the Settings menu and the Connectivity options to get up your connection.

The connection was strong, and didn't drop out going from room-to-room.

The 3G connectivity proved to be fairly robust. We found that the C6 wasn't quite as good as picking up low-level internet signals in traditional problem areas as some phones, but we didn't have trouble getting strong 3G broadband connections while out and about.

Web pages load fairly quickly, though it obviously depends on what's in them. If you're mostly sticking with mobile sites when on the move, then you'll find things move quickly enough on the C6's 3G connection.

More media-heavy sites will take longer, but we found the C6 acquitted itself admirably when it came to 3G browsing overall.

Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate is on hand for file transfers. It's as fast as Bluetooth ever is – so good for a quick file here and there, but nothing to rely on.

The micro-USB port offers USB 2.0 connectivity for the phone. Plugging it into your computer brings up options on the phone for how you want it to appear.

You can choose PC Suite (for use with the included Ovi Suite – Windows only), Mass Storage (for just accessing the files, including drag-and-drop adding of music and video), Image Transfer and Media Transfer.

Adding media via the Mass Storage option worked well for us, with the phone taking a few seconds to search when you open the Music Player app before adding everything it found.

The microSD card slot can take up to 16GB, though only a 2GB card is included. This will last you a while, but if you're serious about loading up with videos to play on the 640 x 360 screen, or even a middle-to-large music collection, you'll probably want to consider an upgrade.

Finally, there's a 3.5mm jack for connecting your own headphones or external speakers, though the included pair has a microphone for hands-free chatting.