The success of the Nokia 5800 has prompted the company to create another model of this breed, that was supposed to replace its predecessor in the hearts of consumers. And that's how it would have come to pass, had it not been for Nokia's desire to launch a more expensive version of the X6 tagged with "Comes with Music". As a result this midrange phone, by far not a top-of-the-line offering, got its price tag padded by a bundled headset and "Comes with Music" subscription. In fact, because of that it could no longer meet the description of a mid-tier model. But since the X6 was supposed to be Nokia's key offering for the first half of 2010, accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign, they opted to give no weight to these considerations.
The scheme with two versions of the same phone where one of them is overpriced has already been tested with the Nokia N97 and N97 mini. The gist of it is this: the first model, that can be readily regarded as a beta version, comes out and retails for quite a bit of money, then all its major flaws get fixed, and storage space reduced in its counterpart with a lighter price tag and a handful of upgrades that make it superior to the predecessor in almost every aspect, barring its memory volume. So from now on, if you ever decide to buy a top-of-the-line phone from Nokia, think twice, whether in three months' time you'll see the same device on the shelves with a more affordable price tag and a lot of useful updates. That's a dangerous trend that can get consumers to think that buying new things means serving as free beta-testers for others, which is a role very few would love to play. Even today the Nokia X6 16Gb's final price tag is yet to be determined, as the X6's sales turned out to be not as stunning, even though this kind of performance had been expected. If you take a calculator in your hands for a second and try to figure out the price of the X6's sales package, you'll see that its sibling should be at at least 120-140 euro cheaper, which is pretty good news for the X6 16Gb, as at this rate it'll fit right into the mid price-bracket and offer decent price/quality ratio.
Nokia views both models as sequels to the 5800, expanding their touchscreen-enabled line-up and serving as their new flagships among music-playing phones. The next flagship solution in the Nokia X-series (XpressMusic now has its own index) will see release in the second half of 2010, more towards Christmas. Curiously enough, they'll put the same scheme to work. I have to note, though, that its release date is still pretty far off, so a lot of things can and probably will change, maybe the junior phone will get cancelled altogether, which would make a lot of sense, since such practices don't look appropriate when used repeatedly.
Over at Nokia they also believe that some users of the Nokia 6300, Nokia N73, Nokia N95 8Gb, might go for the Nokia X6. In Nokia's positioning chart these target audiences are called Technology Stylist and Style Leader. This brings us to the next point - the X6 is a fashion-savvy phone among all other things. But for some reason in this case the word "fashion" is meant in the context of the materials used in it - metal edges, glass plate covering the screen and so on. But none of these things can really tell you much about this phone's design. In my opinion, it makes absolutely no sense when people confuse design with materials used. No doubt, the X6 has a certain distinctive feel to it, whether or not it's unique - that's the question. I, for one, get a strong feeling that it has a lot in common with Samsung's solutions that have exactly the same metal inserts. Although that's nothing but my own opinion, as on closer examination you'll definitely find a multitude of differences, or at least enough of them to say that the X6 has nothing to do with Samsung's trademark designs.
The phone will come in a choice of two colors - black and blue (black casing/red inserts and white casing/blue inserts).
- GPS-navigation – 4-4.5 hours
- Video playback – 3 hours 3 minutes (H.264, speakerphone mode)
- WEB-surfing (EDGE) – 4 hours
- Music time (in earphones) – 34 hours
- Radio – 35 hours
- Games – 5 hours
