Nokia C3
Budget Qwertyphone that looks the business
Review It might look like Nokia's high-powered, business-centric E72, but the C3 offers a stripped-down spec with a price to match and the emphasis on social networking with a full, hard-key Qwerty keyboard.
Key feature: Nokia’s C3
The Nokia C3 isn't exactly tiny at 116 x58 x 14mm and 114g but its tapered edges mean it slides easily into the pocket. The front is made of a glossy plastic with a 2.4in screen atop an old-school five-way navpad which is surrounded by two soft keys, two hard keys for social networking and chat services, plus call start and stop. Beneath those is the full Qwerty keyboard with 37 well-spaced keys that respond nicely to touch.
It's very similar to the keyboard on Nokia's pricier E-series handsets and therefore something that the company has already proved itself very good at. The keys are made of a tactile rubberised plastic and raised in the middle, making them very easy to find under the thumbs.
Handy punctuation like @ and the full stop have their own keys and the sizeable space bar is bigger than the E72's but at a cost, the loss of two keys – exclamation mark and apostrophe, but that's no big deal.
No 3G connectivity, but Wi-Fi is on-board to broaden its reach
The 2.4in LCD screen offers a less-than riveting 320 x 240-pixel resolution, but it's perfectly fine for displaying icons, text and web pages, less so when it comes to delivering pics and video.
COMMENTS
theres...
...the missus's birthday present sorted then
pink to match her new ironing board cover
pointless with out 3g
Without 3g and mobile surfing it's pointless.
Triangulations...
Triangulation using mobile towers is piss poor normally... What you may be seeing is using the wifi router mac addresses that the naughty Streetview cars logged?
I got an E63 from 3,
which is like an E71 without the GPS, and it's no great loss - I've got Google Maps working as a pedestrian navigation aid, and triangulation of location using mobile transmitters has done the job for me so far.
I'd say this looks like a decent little handset, probably would have tempted me if it had been £30 cheaper.
Nice handset, pity about the 3G
The use of S40 instead of S60 on this kind of handset seems entirely sensible. I have a fairly low-end S60 handset (Nokia 6210) and it really doesn't add much to what S40 brings for things like simple browsing, email etc. But the lack of 3G seems a real loss for a data-centric handset. Seems to limit severely what you can do with that impressive keyboard. I guess it keeps the price down, though.
