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It’s been making its way around the various territories in the last few days, and now we’re happy to say that we have the updated firmware running on the Nokia X6 here at AAS (link to our review). The update to v12.0.091 can be installed (once available) either Over the Air or via the Nokia Software Updater on your PC. Even though your data should be preserved during the update, we would always recommend backing up any phone before an update is started.

The X6 is a phone that we’ve heavily reviewed since its release, and while it had a lot of promise, not least as the first Nokia touch-screen device with a capacitive screen, it had a number of bugs, especially in the Music Player application. I’m now off to listen to as much Eurovision and Iron Maiden as I can to see if I can still break it.

One thing to note, at the end of the update, I was offered a chance to take a short web-based survey on my experiences. First time I’ve seen this. I wonder if they’ll take note of me asking for a change-log to be supplied?

Update: 90 minutes later…

Right then, I’ve been putting the X6 under some serious strain in the last hour or so, and I’m happy to say that Nokia have fixed the major memory leaks and RAM handling that made the X6 unreliable under the v11 firmware that was supplied on our review unit.

After about fifteen minutes of gentle usage, but with the music player constantly pushing out the soundtrack from Glee, I would have expected v11 to have locked up or reset the device. The v12 firmware was still motoring along. So I decided to push the X6 hard.

The Gallery was opened, while music was still playing – enough to pull down the X6 in a previous life. Then the web browser; the screen capture app; Nokia’s Gig finder; the Facebook widget; and finally DeviceInfo, to see how much pain the X6’s RAM was in.

4.18mb free.

“That’s fairly harsh,” points out Rafe.

This is more like it, Nokia! The X6 gets to grips with its memory.

Which was the whole point of the exercise, because over the next hour I chopped and changed albums, asking for DRM-ed tracks to be played, MP3’s at different bitrates, albums, singles, one hour long spoken word tracks… and the only thing the X6 did was, at one point, to shut down DeviceInfo in the background to give it a bit more space to work in.

While there are still UI flaws and problems in implementation, the X6 can now be the music player it advertised itself as. I think I’d be happy to change my recommendation now to a “buy” for anyone considering the X6. I’ll have a more in-depth look at the X6’s v12 firmware by the end of the week, but for now, congratulations Nokia. You fixed the bugs. Now you can get on with some polishing.