As we all know, mobile tech publications are usually swamped with news and reviews regarding zillion dollar smartphones and the new iPhone 4 – but what about the lower end of the market?
Well, it too is a pretty competitive place and Nokia intends to give it a royal shake-up with its new device, the Nokia C3. But is it any good, and more importantly, can it fight off the competition from LG, Samsung and INQ?
When you first take the Nokia C3 out of its box you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve been sent the wrong device – it looks expensive, has a beautiful metallic finish and a full BlackBerry-esque Qwerty keyboard.
And this is something of an aberration from Nokia, albeit a pleasant one, as its low-end devices usually look, well, just that: lowly, plastic and cheap.
The Nokia C3 is none of these things. The device is beautifully crafted featuring a metal back plate and high-shine plastic on the front, which looks, at first glance like its metal.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. But for £80, it’d almost be rude to ask for more – especially as it looks like a lower end BlackBerry and not really like a Nokia at all.
The device is also well proportioned and measures in at 115.5x58.1x13.6mm, which means it is marginally bigger than the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and will fit into your pocket snugly. Interestingly, though, the Nokia C3 at 114g is actually lighter than the Bold 9700, which measures in at 122g.
Unfortunately, this is where the BlackBerry comparisons end and, because the Nokia C3 is aimed at the “less fussy” mobile user, Nokia have scrimped on both the hardware and software in order to get the price down to a ridiculously low £80.
For instance, the camera, which is 2-megapixels, doesn’t have a flash and while it's okay in well-lit environments, it’s pretty useless after dark or in poorly lit rooms.
There’s also no 3G either, so you’ve only got Wi-Fi at your disposal, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so long as you’re not bothered about being online 24/7. If you are, however, then you should probably think about upgrading to either an S60 device or a low-end Android handset.
Obviously in a bid to keep the price dramatically low, Nokia has opted with Symbian S40 OS in the C3 – so, it’s not the fastest thing in the world and there’s absolutely no multi-tasking.
This may put off a lot of users, but on the whole during testing, we found that for basic stuff such as navigating, playing games and loading web pages it performed admirably. If you want more than that, you’ll have to pay more. Simple.
On the downside, we had a lot of problems with the Nokia C3’s Wi-Fi, which refused out right to connect to three separate networks – we persisted for about an hour, decided to reset the phone, tried again and, eventually, we managed to get it connected to a network.
The Nokia C3 has Opera Mini built-in as its browser of choice and, while Opera’s performance varies from handset to handset, we have to give the Nokia C3 credit as it worked a treat for basic browsing with Opera Mini’s click-to-zoom function more than compensating for the Nokia C3’s frankly awful navigation key.
There’s also the Ovi Store, which as you’d expect is jam-packed with games and apps that you can download, such as Snaptu, which links all your social networking shizz together on one place.
The Nokia C3 also has three customisable widgets on its homescreen, we used Mail, Facebook and Twitter – although there are plenty more combinations. We found this to be an ideal set up as all the important stuff – so: email, Facebook accounts and Twitter – we all in once place and could be checked with a simple glance.
However, there is a rather annoying delay, where the Nokia C3 cuts to a Nokia Communities screen and then asks you which Wi-Fi connection you’d like to use, before you’re taken to the Facebook page, which takes, roughly, about 10 seconds.
That said, the Twitter widget is pretty awful – so if you’re a Twitter fiend, you might want to look around for an alternative. But overall, the set-up on the homescreen is more than adequate and will easily satisfy the needs of someone that’s not to fussed about cramming their device full of paid-for apps and games.
In terms of storage, the Nokia C3 has a lot. The device comes with a 2GB microSD card and can handle up to 16GB, so you’ve got more than enough room for your music. It also supports practically every form of audio – MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC – under the sun, so there should be no issues with playback.
Possibly the most impressive aspect of the Nokia C3 is its Qwerty keyboard, which is, literally, amazing to type on. The keys are perfectly spaced and the material is soft to the touch, which means typing long emails and texts is an absolute breeze.
As we said, this phone isn’t especially powerful and Nokia have really scrimped on the both the hardware and software to get the price down to a more than competitive £80, but this really doesn’t matter, as the phone is so good and such a pleasure to use that you really just forget about everything else and simply get on with your day.
This is easily one of our favourite budget phones from Nokia. We love the price, the keyboard and its looks.
Granted, it could do with being a tad faster, and we’d have loved S60 instead of the remedial S40 OS, but at £80 on pre-pay, we’re really hard pressed to give it too much of a hard time.
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