The Nokia C3 is the second phone in Espoo’s new Cseries line of cheap messaging mobiles. Unlike the excellent Nokia C5 however, it’s not running the full blown Symbian S60, with free navigation and apps aplenty, but the low power, low end Symbian S40. Can it handle all your social butterfly requirements? 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: Build and keyboard
Once upon a time, we’d have been kicked out of town for suggesting that a 2G, Symbian S40 phone could be an ideal handset for email and social network surfing, but the Nokia C3 really is. Of course, the top notch portrait QWERTY keyboard has a lot to do with this, but Symbian S40 itself has never worked better than on this phone either.
If you’ve ever owned a Nokia before, you’ll be right at home with the Nokia C3 the moment you turn it on: while it’s not pretty, S40 is perfectly functional. The homescreen is made up of three bars, one for contacts, one for social networking feeds, and one with favourite icons (You can access more by pressing the menu button instead). Email is a cinch to set up, and there are more apps to be had on the preloaded Ovi Store.
Of most interest to prospective Nokia C3 buyers will be the Communities app and hub, and we’ve got good and bad news on this front. On the plus side, you can add more than one Twitter and Facebook account (Though you can only be logged into one at a time), and the latest updates from your friends get fed into the middle bar on the homescreen, including profile pictures. The Facebook app is well fleshed out, with options to search friends, check messages, see events and even upload photos (At QVGA resolution only, mind).
The Twitter app works in a very similar way, but the very fact that Twitter is a different beast entirely means it runs up against the phone’s limitations. Both apps only let you see five updates at a time, and if you’re not in a Wi-Fi hotspot, loading more can take a while. It’s not such an issue for Facebook (That or we just don’t have many friends), but for Twitter, where you can easily be following people in the three or four figures, it makes it all but unusable. You’ll want to install the utterly superb Snaptu from the Ovi Store immediately, as we did: it loads far more tweets, far more quickly.
We have no complaints about Nokia’s instant messaging options on the Nokia C3 however, other than that they’re tucked away at the very bottom of the messaging sub menu, with no obvious way to set as a keyboard shortcut. You can sign into GTalk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! and Ovi chat services, have multiple conversations at once, and background them too – basically everything you’d want to do. You could install eBuddy if you prefer other IM clients like Facebook chat, but it won’t run in the background, making it a bit pointless.
It takes some getting used to working out what else can run in the background on the Nokia C3, since its screen size seems to suggest everything should – Symbian S40 will only background your IM chats and music however (The latter is extremely useful and flawless, with none of the skipping of the HTC Smart). You’ll soon get over that, and even the pauses as you shutdown an app, but we’re still a bit baffled by some of the UI decisions. For one thing, the Nokia C3 highlights widgets on the homescreen in the same colour as they already are (Er, grey) which confuddles things a tad. And for some reason, by default, our Nokia C3 shows our own Facebook profile picture and status (Rather than your friends’ latest), as if we need regular reminding of who we are.
And Symbian’s other unnecessary quirks still persist too. If Apple has shown anything with the iPhone, it’s that there really is no need for the myriad of internet settings. People really do just want an on or off switch, and Wi-Fi to automatically take precedence for data when connected. We had to fiddle around for quite a while to get data working fine with the Vodafone SIMs we used, and in hotspots, but once we cleared this hurdle, surfing was seamless on the Nokia C3.
We could complain about the lack of Symbian S60 and all those extra apps it can run, but really, that’s not the point of the Nokia C3, and would only have served to raise the price. The Nokia C3 handles the majority of instant messaging and social networking requirements of today’s ADD generation just fine, and that’s all it needs to do.
Review sample supplied by Vodafone
Read the rest of our Nokia C3 review now
Nokia C3 review
Nokia C3 review: Build and keyboard
