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NOKIA’S OUTING IN the music phone arena is relatively new compared to SonyEricsson. How the Finnish phone maker distinguishes itself from other handset makers in the musical phone market is with its unlimited music download service Comes With Music. Tracks and albums can be purchased separately or with a few of Nokia’s handsets there’s an unlimited music download option bundled in.

Nokia’s first music oriented phone in its Xpressmusic category was launched at the end of 2008. That Nokia 5800 was a full touchscreen phone that could be purchased either by itself, or with the all-you-can-eat music download service thrown in. Its successor is the Nokia X6, which has some distinct improvements over its predecessor in terms of its screen, storage size, build quality and form factor.

The X6 is Nokia’s first phone to feature a capacitive touch screen, as all the previous models have used the far less responsive resistive displays, and this makes the 3.2-inch 640×360 resolution screen of the X6 much more accurate in interpreting touch screen requests. This is particularly noticeable during text messaging or typing anything else on the virtual keyboard. We’re not the biggest fans of landscape text entry on Nokia’s previous touchscreen phones, since they tend to be a clumsy to use with lots of inaccuracies and a limited preview screen. Nokia has corrected one of these flaws with the improved responsiveness of the screen on the X6, but it still hasn’t fixed the tiny preview area.

With 32GB of built-in storage Nokia has opted for no microSD card slot on the X6. With the current microSD ceiling at 16GB, bundling in a microSD slot would increase the storage capacity to up to 48GB – and 64GB once 32GB microSD cards come out – but that larger capacity is reserved for Nokia’s flagship N97 handset which also has 32GB of onboard memory and also a microSD slot.

While the X6 build is sleeker in appearance than the 5800, the dimensions are pretty much identical, with the X6 measuring 111mm long, 51mm wide, 18.8mm thick and weighing 122grams. The X6 design has a more professional look compared to the almost Fisher-Price toylike 5800.

Comes With Music is clearly the selling point behind the X6, because there is no longer an option to buy this handset without the service. What is a unclear is what happens after the year of free music is up. We been informed that the DRM based music will still be accessible on the PC and the phone but renewal of the contract is left up to the operator’s discretion. So if a phone is purchased with a 24-month contract, as it is with Orange in the UK, it’s up to that network whether it wants to extend the Comes With Music contract every year thereafter, for the life time of the agreement.