We’ve given the build quality of the Nokia X6 a grilling and delved deep into its Symbian OS, but now it’s time to take a closer look at the most crucial feature of all – how it handles as a phone. How is the call quality of the Nokia X6 and how about the battery life? Read on for everything in our review right here…

Let’s get straight into the meat of things: the call quality on the Nokia X6 is excellent. We didn’t have any problems chatting away wherever, either in normal mode, or on speakerphone. Your co-natterer comes through loud and clear so you can happily hold it close to, or drop it on your desk and talk out loud. The Nokia X6’s build is also great for grip. It’s long, narrow and just thick enough to feel comfortable lodged next to your skull, in a way that the Nokia N900 slab or chunky N97 original aren’t.

Check out our full Nokia X6 review

On the software front, it also handles call well. The screen switches off on the Nokia X6 when you hold it to your ear, but pull it away and it automatically lights up again, without any need to tug the awful unlock switch on the side of the phone. The sliding contacts bar on the homescreen is also a swift way to fire up your most frequent call victims, as the large picture tiles are easy to scroll and stop, then prod to launch.

It’s also an improvement on touchscreen Noks like the Nokia 5800 for call handling for the simple reason that the screen is capacitive, and finger friendly. If you need to press a number mid call, or check a contact, it’s much easier to just push the Show Dialler option than slide out the stylus and muck around with it mid conversation.

As for battery life, we’re back on Nokia’s sturdy samrtphone territory here. The Nokia N900 would make it from sun up to beddy bye, but only just. The Nokia X6 has much more stamina. It easily lasted all day and beyond with 3G blazing, email rolling on through, Wi-Fi left on and us chilling out to a few albums on it.

And that was with pretty intensive use: its standby time is superb. We left it for a day and a half, and when we came back, it had only dropped one bar of battery life, out of seven. You’ll probably want to top it up most nights before you go to bed still, it’s true, but at a push, you’ll almost certainly get two days of regular use out of the Nokia X6.

We’re very happy with how the Nokia X6 handles as a voice dealing mobile. Our only problem is the one touchscreen phones inevitably face: the lack of a dialler that’s always there to push straight away, and even then, the Nokia X6 deals with it tactfully.