Nokia 6 review: Back in black

Gallery

The Gallery app can display your photos organized into albums, or sorted chronologically. It can also sync with cloud services. The pinch gesture works for picking thumbnail size.

Gallery app

When viewing a single image, you can tap on the screen and a filmstrip appears on the bottom, which you can scroll to find another shot without going back to the full gallery interface. You get options for sharing and basic edit operations, plus a truly detailed 'Details' pane, complete with EXIF data.

Viewing an image

There's a more capable editor too. You get the usual filters, cropping, and image parameter editing, including hue saturation and curves adjustment.

Editing an image

Video player

The video player is a no-nonsense affair, yet it does offer niceties like volume and brightness control with a swipe action on the two sides of the screen - left is for volume, right is for brightness. It supports subtitles too, and there's also a pop out mode where the video can play above the rest of the stuff on your homescreen.

Video player

Music player

The Music player follows a similar function-over-form philosophy. It does what most other such apps do, under a Nokia blue veil. The My Music tab gives you quick access to favorite tracks and playlists, while Local Music is the familiar interface showing you your library grouped by artists, albums, and genres.

Music app

The Now playing interface isn't groundbreaking either - it displays album art and controls. Swipe to the right for the playlist, and to the left for lyrics. There isn't an equalizer, just two modes of Dolby surround sound - Music and Theatre.

Now playing • Current playlist • Sound modes • Settings

FM radio

There's an FM radio receiver too - fans of free music over the airwaves, rejoice! It supports RDS and it can display the current station's name and info. Oddly, if you tap on the star next to the frequency, it interprets it as a sign that you want to delete it. No, I want to add it to favorites! Output through the speakers is also supported, but you need the headset to serve as the antenna.

FM radio

Audio is impressively clean

The Nokia 6 delivered excellently clean output in both parts of our audio quality test. It started off with perfect scores when hooked up to an active external amplifier and then the only affected reading when headphones came into play was the stereo crosstalk. That one took a very minor hit too so we really couldn’t want more in terms of clarity.

Volume levels weren’t as impressive, but they weren’t bad either with the Nokia 6 reaching above average in both tests. Given the mid-range nature of the phone it’s a really good showing on that account too.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Nokia 6	+0.12, -0.11	-91.8	89.8	0.0018	0.019	-91.9
Nokia 6 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.02	-91.2	92.1	0.0022	0.017	-78.2
vivo V5	+0.02, -0.12	-91.8	92.9	0.0055	0.0097	-89.8
vivo V5 (headphones attached)	+0.38, -0.10	-91.3	92.3	0.0073	0.256	-55.1
Motorola Moto Z Play	+0.04, -0.02	-93.0	93.1	0.0018	0.0085	-93.8
Motorola Moto Z Play (headphones attached)	+0.05, -0.02	-92.7	92.8	0.0023	0.054	-52.4
Meizu MX6	+0.10, -0.03	-94.2	94.0	0.0019	0.0064	-89.3
Meizu MX6 (headphones attached)	+0.30, -0.07	-92.5	93.0	0.810	0.271	-31.3
Asus Zenfone 3	+0.03, -0.30	-86.6	83.6	0.0017	0.049	-91.1
Asus Zenfone 3 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.03	-92.4	92.4	0.0018	0.021	-88.2
ZTE Axon 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
ZTE Axon 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0

Nokia 6 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.