Nokia C3 Review

Introduction:

One of the features Nokia touts for its Cseries line is “messaging for the masses”. The Finnish company made a name for itself with the excellent thumbboard devices from the Eseries, providing a Symbian alternative for fans of the BlackBerry form factor. The Nokia C3 is its first QWERTY messenger to be powered by Series 40 - still the most widespread mobile platform in the world.

On top of that, it provides great alternative to the ever more popular homescreen widgets by allowing you access to social networking directly from the home screen. Easy SNS access usually implies that the phone is targeting the younger crowd, and so it should come in some flashy colors, and at a bargain basement price. The Nokia C3 check-marks all these, but let's see if it manages to succeed in the details...

What's in the box

Design:

We got the Slate Grey version, which has more of a bluish hue, and looks stylish nonetheless. There are also the Hot Pink and Golden White color variants of the Nokia C3, and all have metallic finish at the front. The back, where we have the 2MP camera, has a two-colored design. There is an aluminum battery cover in the middle with the front panel color without the metallic finish, and the rest is black plastic, including the sides.



You can compare the Nokia C3 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

On the left hand side are the microUSB and microSD slots, the top houses the charging port and the 3.5 audio jack and that's all. The only other elements are two small buttons down at both sides that help you easily eject the battery cover.


The regular 2.4” LCD screen with QVGA resolution doesn’t have any touch layers over or under it, and it remains pretty visible under direct sunlight. Right underneath it are the two programmable soft keys, followed by two chrome-like action keys, and finishing down with the send and end buttons. The action keys on both sides of the square D-Pad complement nicely its chrome-like rim, and can be assigned to different tasks. Out of the box the one on the left of the D-Pad starts the Communities app, and the one on the right fires up Messaging, but you can assign different actions to them, which makes the default labeling next to them redundant.



The Nokia C3 thumbboard is where the added value comes from, and it has the same four row layout and roughly the same keys as the E-series keyboards, but is slightly curved downwards and thus more comfortable to type. The handset is very compact, almost too much so, so we were worried we would be often mistyping with our sausage digits. Much to our surprise, though, we kept pressing the correct convex key among the bunch of other keys around, and typing soon sped up significantly.  The keyboard is backlit in white like the rest of the physical buttons in the front, with the exception of the ubiquitous green and red for answering and closing a call.


The overall design reminds very much of the smallest Eseries phones from Nokia, which gives it a classy more expensive look; the metal plate over the battery is a thoughtful touch as well. Nokia has gone so far as to even skin the interface to look like the ones on the Eseries devices, so you can easily fool everyone around that you are typing away on a business-class smartphone.

Interface and Functionality:

The Series 40 interface is so widespread that you most probably have seen it on some of the phones that you, or people you know, have/had, unless you live in the US, where Nokia is not very popular. In the Nokia C3 it is masked to look like a Symbian interface in terms of graphics. It is a pretty reliable platform that very rarely crashes, but, of course, you can forget about multitasking.

The phonebook doesn’t stray away from what you’ve seen on all Nokia Series 40 devices. It’s customizable and allows for picture ID and ringtones to be attached to contacts, but there is no smart dial function to search for them.

The Home screen has three editable strips of content – on top are the favorite contacts, and the bottom one is a launcher with five application icons. The closest to the all popular widget type is the middle row, where you can rotate for example your Facebook status, friend updates and notifications, right from the homescreen - a neat and welcome feature for the social networking addicts.


The menu page is a simple and functional icon grid, while the whole interface uses a nice big font that is very easy on the eyes. Notable here is the Communities app, which updates Facebook and Twitter in the background, for example. There is also an Ovi Store shortcut which kept giving us low memory errors upon start – not that you will be installing tons of apps on this one.

Speaking of apps, the core features are covered well here. The Nokia C3 has a no-thrills, simple to use calendar with month view on the left and the day's meetings, notes, anniversaries, etc., on the right of the screen. The reminder alarm option forced our unit into multiple restart mode, until we put in a SIM card. To the list of utilities we can easily add the handy Converter, Calculator, Voice Recorder, Flickr client and To-Do apps.



Messaging:

The core strength of the unpretentious Nokia C3 is written communication, since the QWERTY keyboard accelerates typing greatly. You may find yourself shooting text messages and email back and forth, or chatting more often than calling someone from the phone. The email application allows for easy setup of popular accounts, but the phone memory is somewhat limited for a proper full HTML view, or downloading large attachments. Since you don't have a document viewer on the Nokia C3, those features would not add much to the limited email experience anyway. The default IM program is Ovi Chat, but the handset works with Gtalk as well, and other popular instant messengers can be easily set up.


A QWERTY keyboard is an excellent solution for quick typing on a small device, and BlackBerry users will surely attest to that. We only wish the one on the Nokia C3 was slightly larger, but the clever curved layout and the convex keys tip the balance towards some pretty decent usability.

Internet and Connectivity:

Nokia went with Opera Mini for the general browsing solution on the C3, which is an excellent choice of a browser, as it renders the pages on its own servers and sends them over compressed and bite-sized. Thus even the weak specs of the C3 managed to load our full home page in a few seconds. Flash Lite 3.0 is supported for proper display of pages as the creator intended, but the default S40 browser with it runs only in the Web Services mode – i.e. when you fire up Nokia.mobi, MySpace or AccuWeather from the Internet option. The D-pad serves to guide an arrow pointer which zooms the underlying section when clicked, and then executes a link, if needed.


Nokia C3 doesn't have a 3G baseband, you will be limited to EDGE speeds when out and about, but you can hook up the handset to a Wi-Fi hotspot provided that faster data speeds are needed. The handset has no GPS capabilities either, however Bluetooth and an FM radio are still on board.

Camera and Multimedia:

The 2MP camera on the C3 might seem to have huge lens, but does its duties poorly. The colors are fine, however detail and focus are almost non-existent. Photos look like you have been applying some special effect to them, while cursing and fumbling around with the lean camera interface.
The handset now has a dedicated multimedia gallery called Photos, unlike other Series 40 handsets, where all files are mixed up in a single location. Capturing videos produced appalling results, unless paltry QVGA resolution with 15fps sounds good enough for you.




Nokia C3 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution.

The music player is basic, but works well. It sorts the files by artist, album, or genre, and can keep playing in the background, which is the closest to multitasking you will get on the Nokia C3. There is a Radio and Media widget (well, sort of) that you can place on the home screen, which will show you details of the song currently being played. The speaker is of average strength, but the sound is quite clear, and the same holds true in headset mode – very clean audio output and good base sounds, but the volume is low even at maximum settings. Although there isn't a dedicated rocker, volume can be changed with pressing the D-pad up and down, which is almost as if, unless you are outside of the music player.

Video play is limited to MPEG-4 files up to QVGA, and the meager 64MB RAM often make the phone hiccup even at these unimpressive resolutions.

Performance:

The ear speaker of the Nokia C3 is not very strong, and the voices have a static hiss to them. The other party said we sounded a bit muffled, but the volume was loud enough to distinct the caller's voice.

The Nokia C3's 1320mAh battery is rated for 7 hours of talk time and 20 days of standby, which is fine, but not very impressive, considering that the phone doesn't have to maintain 3G connectivity.

Conclusion:

The Nokia C3 is a well-targeted phone, made predominantly for affordable messaging and social network updates on the go. By stripping it down of functions unneeded by its target market like 3G, GPS or a touchscreen, the company has managed to keep the price at bay.

Moreover, Nokia has cleverly designed the C3 to look and feel like a device from the business-friendly Eseries, altering the interface of the Series 40 platform. If only it had managed to cram a bit better optics for the camera, we'd go so far as to say Nokia will sell a boatload of the C3. What will be the profit margin on this handset, is a totally different story.

We are hard pressed to find anything in the Nokia C3's price range as an alternative. For a Benjamin more you enter a whole category of QWERTY smartphones – the Nokia Eseries, Blackberrys, Samsung QWERTY phones, etc. They have mobile OS's, better cameras and 3G connectivity. But that's a Benjamin more. Maybe the Samsung CorbyTXT B3210 (aka Samsung Genio QWERTY) will do the trick with its even lower price, if you can live sans the Wi-Fi, otherwise the price is very right on the Nokia C3 to be your basic messaging phone that you can use for social networking deeds as well.

Nokia C3 Video Review: