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Nokia X3 Touch and Type

Nokia X3 Touch and Type

Candybar sweetener

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Review If you think candybar handsets should have touchscreens then Touch and Type should be right up your street. This is Nokia's attempt to breathe new life into the rusty trusty S40 platform by adapting it for a touchscreen interface. The first two T&T handsets to be released in the UK are the X3-02 and C3-01 and it's the former I have on my desk at the moment.

Nokia X3 Touch and Type

Touching thought: Nokia's X3-02

Nokia's handset design has been on an upswing of late and the X3-02 continues the trend. It's thin, light, well made and very solid. It's smart and stylish too, though Nokia's talk of the screen looking like still water, with the keypad below resembling rippling waves, rather lost me.

Unusually the keypad is laid out as a 4 x 4 rather than 4 x 3 grid. Two of the extra keys go for a Burton because they act as rather small call keys, but the remaining two provide handy direct access to the music player and the messaging application.

The design orphans the zero key at bottom right, but I didn't find that a problem, as I was rather impressed by the keypad's quality and ease of use. Conspicuous by its absence is any sort of navigation pad – if you want to select something, you have to tap the resistive touch screen.

Nokia X3 Touch and Type

The 4 x 4 keypad layout crams in extra keys

Resistive it may be but it's a fine example of the breed. Swipes, taps and long presses all work perfectly and the UI is fluid and responsive, with only some occasional stutter in the kinetic scrolling of the contacts list to mar proceedings. The haptic feedback is nicely calibrated too, but as I dislike haptic feedback of any sort, a quick rummage in the settings was in order to turn it off.

Next page: Chewing it over

Latest Comments

little off balance

x302 now my primary mobi tho it feels a littl off balance ...

would happily trade the xtra screen width gained in the 3x4 keyboard layout (the 4th *#0 column) for the standard 4x3 matrix even if that added to the length. also much needed is a scroll rocker on right side.

sweet ph otherwise and a well balanced review.

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nah

"""Would be excellent if this ran Meego or Android."""

I suspect with that relatively tiny battery (~850mAh) Linux just isn't a good option. I really expected to see S60 here, though as I thought S40 was semi-officially killed off.

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Camera button

That button you can see at lower left is the release for the battery cover. There's one on the left too.

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haptic feedback

little vibration of the phone after tap

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Google is your friend

Basically it vibrates to subsitute for the tactile feedback that a keyboard would provide, but a touchscreen doesn't.

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