The Nokia C3 isn’t a high falluting smartphone aimed at crashing the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Nokia E72‘s pricey party, but a Pay As You Go phone with a QWERTY keyboard at a knockdown price. Can you pound out emails and SMS missives at the same rate as those pricier messaging mobiles or will it fall apart in your pocket after just a few texts? Read on and find out in this part of our Nokia C3 review.
Read the rest of our Nokia C3 review now
Nokia C3 review
Nokia C3 review: Symbian S40
We can’t fault the outer shell of the Nokia C3: it’s super sturdy for something that costs so little, and will have you more moth-like friends cooing and fluttering over to ask if it’s a BlackBerry Bold on a regular basis. The only way to describe it is premium. But at £80, it’s not.
While it’s not especially thin, the Nokia C3 is rock solid, with most of the ports placed in all the right spots. On the left hand side are the micro USB and microSD card slots (behind flaps that are easy to pry open), while a 3.5mm audio slots resides on the top (Gold star), along with Nokia’s proprietary charging slot – no, we don’t know why Nokias need this when there’s a USB connection either, but it’s the only way to juice it up, and the only real flaw here.
On the back, you’ll find the camera (2MP, no flash, QVGA video recording), and on the sides are two buttons, which when pressed simultaneously release the back panel: it won’t come off in your pocket by accident. It’s hard to criticise this aspect of the Nokia C3′s industrial design. It’s firm, polished, and so sophisticated that we were convinced it had a metal backplate.
The Nokia C3′s screen however sports a curious design quirk, though one we hesitate to call a flaw. While we don’t begrudge Nokia for setting it so far down under the glaze, or keeping it low resolution (320×240, but it’s still perfectly visible), the decision to make it ridged at the edges is an odd one. Towards the bezel on either side, the see through plastic slopes down at angle, which isn’t noticeable when looked at straight on, but when looked at from the side will keep tricking you into thinking there’s a smudge on the screen, or a scratch. It’s only a mild distraction, but we do wonder why Nokia went out of its way to do this.
One thing you can rely on Nokia to come through with though is excellent battery life, and the Nokia C3 is suitably powersipping. Since it’s a 2G phone running lowly Symbian S40, it just runs and runs. In fact, after charging it up and testing it heavily over the course of several days, we’ve still not run it down completely. You can easily get four to five days between charges, if not more, and it’s ideal as a music phone too: it sucks in all the music from an SD card and merrily plays it back from hours on end, with cover art to boot.
Things aren’t quite so spiffy on the image and video front however, as the Nokia C3’s camera is atrocious: it snaps quite quickly for a phone, but hemorrhages shots in low light and is lacking the ISO options of other Nokias – you can only tweak the white balance.
The keyboard’s what you came here for though. There are phones with bigger displays and smarter operating systems to be had for little more than the price of the Nokia C3, so it’s the real selling point: touchscreens at this price point aren’t pleasant for typing on, and the teens snapping handsets up at this tier of the market want easy ways to natter to their mates beyond mere voice calls.
To that end, the QWERTY on the Nokia C3 delivers. It’s a tad different from the portrait keyboard uses on its E series phones, with longer, softer keys, but it’s actually very similar to the board on close rival the INQ Chat 3G, minus the dedicated .com button (No real loss). With a bit of practice, you’ll be blitzing through texts, emails and instant message conversations few cheap phones can match, save INQ’s handset and the Samsung Genio Slide. If we have a criticism, it’s the space bar isn’t firm enough: miss the exact middle and it’ll dump you down onto a key above instead, but for the money it’s still solid.
In fact, what’s much more likely to slow down all your social networking festivities on the Nokia C3 is Symbian S40, and more pressingly, the 2G only connection. There is Wi-Fi on board the Nokia C3 for connecting quicker in hotspots, but it’s not got great reception compared to other mobiles we’ve tested recently, and we’d have much preferred a 3G connection in its place, a compromise Nokia made with the barely more expensive Nokia C5.
These however, are mere quibbles. It’s just the price you pay (or rather, don’t) for getting a phone so cheap, and otherwise so practical.
Review sample supplied by Vodafone
Read the rest of our Nokia C3 review now
Nokia C3 review
Nokia C3 review: Symbian S40
