The Nokia C3 doesn’t have any pretensions about taking on the iPhone 4 or Samsung Galaxy S. Instead, it’s a delightful looking QWERTY messaging phone, with a shockingly low price tag: just £80 on Pay As You Go. We’ve nabbed a finished version of the phone for a full review just down the pipeline, but in the meantime, check out the unboxinating photos right here!
Although it’s larger than the Nokia C5 phone we recently gave a glowing review to, the Nokia C3 is actually set slightly lower in the market. Running on its 2.4-inch QVGA screen is the less powerful Symbian S40 (As opposed to Symbian S60). It won’t play high end games, but it’s more than enough to serve up email and instant message chats on the fly, and that’s all Nokia’s intending you use that full QWERTY keyboard on the Nokia C3 for, BlackBerry style.
We certainly can’t complain about the performance for £80: the keyboard is bouncy enough, Symbian S40 works smoothly and we didn’t see any of the horrible screen blackouts that ruin Symbian S60 on touchscreen phones.
Truth be told, we’re a bit disappointed by the lack of connectivity with the Nokia C3: if a fledgling company like INQ can get 3G and GPS in for an extra £20, we’d have hoped a company with the vast scale of Nokia could do likewise.
Still, the Wi-Fi inside the Nokia C3 should make up for that at home, and it’s a minor quibble when the keyboard’s so robust and Symbian S40′s inbox and messaging features are so straight forward. We’ll be setting loose our full Nokia C3 review just as soon as we can, but in the meantime, peep the photos right here!
Out Now | £80 | Nokia
