The Nokia X6 touchscreen musicphone is a Symbian-powered handset which sets focus on media and especially music. Being the newest big brother of music handsets such as the 5230 XpressMusic it features more advanced means to play music.
One of the features that was highlighted was the Playlist DJ which lets you create playlist based on your mood. This is done by moving some sliders which is displaying four different icons.
It is now later revealed that this in fact is a third party application from Syntonetic and you can download it for free for a limited time from the OVI Store until 31st of October. After this date the application will costs 4.99€. Only Nokia’s touch-enabled phones are officially supported and below are screenshots from the N97 with the application in use.
As you can see the your music library needs to be profiled before you can benefit the functions of the application. This is done by having the application access the net to pull down information about a song. The main screen has sliders with avatars to display four different moods you are in and you can change these sliders to best match the playlist that is generated.
To be able to profile the music you simply press options and choose music profiling and the application will take care of the rest. The application is straight forward to use and don’t have any hidden advanced features that users have to look up.
Despite the application connecting to the Internet it’s not too data intensive, the only downside is that if you have many songs on your Symbian-powered handset it will take very long time. (Compare that to refreshing the music library on your handset). The “simple” profiling takes a shorter time and a red progress bar is displayed when you do this. Should the “simple” profiling fail to find all the info about the songs in your handset it turns automatically to something called deep profiling. This is displayed by a blue progress bar and is also the one that is most data intensive. You can hide the progress bar anytime during the profiling process and should you stop it, it will simply resume music profiling on the remaining tracks it profile.
Once you have profiled some music tracks will automatically pop up when you move the sliders around. The three buttons at the bottom let you play the music from the generated playlist, manually add songs into the playlist, or save the playlist on your handset. To remove the songs or clear the playlist you first press options and then select the appropriate action to perform. As you can see the screenshot, moving the slider for the smiley to the top and all others to the bottom it revealed tracks such as Jace Everett’s Bad Things (Opening theme to True Blood). While the lyrics of this song are not very happy at all, the song itself has a relaxing feel to it. While the application is not 100% accurate it’s quite accurate in terms of how the songs or melodies go.
Overall the application is very simple to use with only some glitches here and there. Taking the biggest ones first, the profiling takes a huge amount of time. This is luckily more or less a one time process, depending on how frequent you change the music of your handset. The application will always connect to the internet to pull down song information and there is no way to turn this off, in other words not an application you would want to use while roaming. Minor annoyances is that the application can only be used in portrait mode when tested with the N97 and that the sliders reset themselves when you start the application the next time.
That said the application is free of charge until the 31st of October so if you haven’t downloaded it yet do so from the OVI Store.
Have you found anything else you like or dislike about this application?
[Via Symbianworld]
