Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type review

Nokia seem to have the missing link in the evolution of mobile phones. The Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type is an attempt to bring the best of both worlds. A touch phone in a form factor that’s as classic as it gets.

Like it or not, touchscreen phones are the future and it would be a smart move to get ready for the switch. It’s up to you really. You can choose while there still is choice. Or you can simply wait for the inevitable.

But you know what, you can be as uncertain and old-fashioned and backward about touchscreen as you like. And still be prepared. The transition doesn’t have to be painful says Nokia with their C3-01 Touch and Type.

  
Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type official photos

And as we found out reviewing the Nokia X3-02, the touchscreen/numpad combo worked impressively well on a slim metallic body. Little wonder then, Nokia are going for the same thing with the C3-01 Touch and Type.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• Quad-band 3G with 10Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
• Neat and well built, slim, light and metal clad
• 2.4" 256K-color resistive TFT QVGA touchscreen
• S40 6th edition UI
• 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera
• VGA video recording at 15fps
• Wi-Fi b/g/n
• Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
• Bluetooth v2.1 (with A2DP)
• Standard microUSB port (charging enabled)
• USB On-The-Go functionality
• microSD card slot (32 GB supported)
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Extra soft and precise haptic feedback

Main disadvantages

• Small screen (for a touch phone)
• No multitasking
• No GPS
• Fixed-focus camera
• No smart dialing
• No video-call camera
• No adequate storage out of the box
• No accelerometer sensor
• No document viewer

The Nokia C3-01 starts from roughly the same spot as its X3-02 sibling. And obviously, it isn’t going anywhere more exciting or advanced. This kind of phones have their limitations and they’re more than obvious. S40 handsets have been getting a lot of stick (at least from us) for the lack of even basic multitasking, smart dialing and a document viewer.

  
Nokia C3-01 pays us a visit

But still, we did like the touch and type concept – more for the look and feel and less for the features. The C3-01 will have to live up to a very high standard of build quality and design to boost its chances of survival. It certainly helps though to have a true classic and a massive bestseller as an inspiration. The Nokia 6300 belongs to different times but its timeless charm is all over the C3-01.

Good messaging

The messaging department is certainly up to the task. The Nokia C3-01 is capable of handling all the common message types including SMS, MMS, as well as flash and audio messages and there’s easy email setup, too.

The keyboard on the C3-01 is up to the task and will please the heavy texters out there. This time Nokia chose the classic layout, so you want need extra time to adjust. Conversations view mode is here too (that’s the threaded message feature) and in fact Conversations replaces the regular Inbox.

    
Nokia C3-01 messaging app

The editor is well organized and you won’t spend too much time finding your way around. Nokia has added four new virtual controls due to the lack of D-pad – two arrow keys, letter case switch and symbols. Of course you can tap to move the cursor wherever you want, but you’ll still need those two arrows for precise positioning. The symbol and letter case features are also available from the numpad, so there is no real need of them on the screen.

When composing the message there’s a character counter and message part counter available and when you’re done you pick the recipient from the contacts list, the recently used numbers, the call log or contact groups. You can have a favorite contact too (just one).

And of course, you can enter the number manually if it’s not on any of those lists.

The email client does pretty well to meet most user needs. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email accounts. The email client supports SSL, which enables it to handle a Gmail account for example.

    
The email client is pretty good

Setting up the email client was extremely easy. It just required an email address and entering and confirming the password – the Nokia C3-01 took care of the rest.

The better gallery

The S40 Gallery app was trying to be too many things at once and being a photo gallery wasn’t among its strong points. Now, there’s a separate icon in the main menu – Photos, which serves the one and only purpose of viewing the photos and videos on your phone.

The functionality is pretty much the same, but at least the Photo gallery gets rid of the cruft of file managing features and leaves only the image-related stuff in.

   
The Photos app is now a proper gallery

The Photos app on the Nokia C3-01 offers only a single viewing mode, displaying a grid of 12 pictures on the screen. You can switch to landscape mode from the menu though – it makes better use of the screen real estate when you open a photo (there are black bars in portrait mode).

There’s flick scrolling and it’s fluid enough. It’s only you can see the phone struggle with the slide animation at times – much like it does with any other scrolling item throughout the interface.

   
Viewing a single photo

Zooming in on a picture is only possible with the onscreen zoom shortcuts. At least, it’s fast and relatively smooth, even for 5MP images.

   
Timeline view

You can organize photos into albums, view them in a timeline (they are ordered by the date they were taken) and of course you can start a slide show.

As for the regular Gallery app, it’s still here – but it’s hidden in the Applications menu. It’s quite a capable file manager, especially for a feature phone. It can manage folders and files – both one by one and in bulk.

   
The regular gallery

Music player is OK

The music player of the Nokia C3-01 has decent looks and a solid set of features. It has great all-round functionality, including album art, and a fair number of formats are supported.

The music player is controlled either via the on-screen interface or the shortcut hardware key just below the display . Songs can be filtered by artist, album and genre. The player handles AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, WMA, AMR-NB. Naturally the A2DP profile is supported, allowing the use of stereo Bluetooth earphones.

    
The music player does the job

As usual, the artist and title of the currently playing song are shown on the homescreen. They appear in the Radio and music area on the homescreen so they need to be enabled in the Homescreen mode settings for the info to be displayed.

   
Equalizer • homescreen • the shortcut key launches the quick media menu

The music player also has an equalizer with a few available presets.

The 5 megapixel camera is fixed-focus only

The Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type has a 5 megapixel camera– but there’s no autofocus. The maximum image resolution is 2592x1944 pixels.

Typical Series 40, the camera settings are rather limited. The available options include portrait mode, white balance, various effects and a self timer.

  
  
The camera user interface

While impressive as a number, the 5 megapixels of the Nokia C3-01 camera fail to impress. The produced images are the same quality as the X3-02 ones – lots of noise and way too heavy compression. These two combined seem to bring down the practical resolution of the C3-01 camera below 5MP. There’s also obvious oversharpening and even some purple fringing too.

Excellent connectivity for a budget phone

The Nokia C3-01 offers quad-band GSM and UMTS support. There is also HSPA support, download speed potentially reaching 10.2 Mbps, and up speed as good as 2 Mbps.

Bluetooth is version 2.1 and A2DP is of course enabled. The Nokia C3-01 uses a microUSB port for both data connections and charging.

The bigger treat though is USB On-the-go. The Nokia C3-01 can access USB flash drives and even other phones. Of all the USB flash drives we tested, the C3-01 only failed with one (card readers don’t work either). Non-Nokia-made handsets generally refused to share their memory too.

If you happened to connect two USB on-the-go devices – it depends on which end the USB on-the-go cable is your “browsing” device to understand which opens which. By the way, a special USB-OTG-enabled cable like the one that came with the Nokia N8, is not included in the C3-01 Touch and Type’s box. You’ll have to buy one separately.

Anyway, the C3-01 successfully browsed the N8’s memory drive but, when we turned the connection the other way around, something odd happened. Both devices started flashing “Device not supported” warnings. So, your mileage may vary when using USB on-the-go to connect to other phones (both S40 and Symbian devices worked).

Wi-Fi connectivity is also at hand. In fact, the Wi-Fi is one of the key features of the Nokia C3-01 – it is one of the cheaper Wi-Fi enabled phones on the market.

The Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type also comes complete with a memory card slot. Coupled with a card reader it can usually give you the fastest data transfer rates.

And finally, there's the standard 3.5mm audio jack, which allows you to use your own headphones, but doesn't have TV-out functionality.

Good browser, small screen

Browsing the internet on the Nokia C3-01 is a pleasant experience. Even the most elaborate pages are rendered well and finding your way around is reasonably comfortable on the touch-enabled display.

    
The touch-enabled S40 web browser

As you might guess the virtual cursor is no more, but there is some familiar touch controls borrowed from Symbian S60 – the full screen switch and the zoom key. There is kinetic scrolling too, which works well enough.

The dedicated zoom key is the only zooming option – neither double tap nor the volume rocker works.

Despite the Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 support, Nokia C3-01 web browser doesn’t support Flash. If you want to watch some YouTube stuff you’ll have to rely on the mobile version of the website. Anyway, the lack of Flash is not a big deal, especially for that small screen and the hardware specs.

Like most other S40 phones, the Nokia C3-01 has the Opera Mini 5 browser preinstalled.

   

Excellent connectivity for a budget phone

The Nokia C3-01 offers quad-band GSM and UMTS support. There is also HSPA support, download speed potentially reaching 10.2 Mbps, and up speed as good as 2 Mbps.

Bluetooth is version 2.1 and A2DP is of course enabled. The Nokia C3-01 uses a microUSB port for both data connections and charging.

The bigger treat though is USB On-the-go. The Nokia C3-01 can access USB flash drives and even other phones. Of all the USB flash drives we tested, the C3-01 only failed with one (card readers don’t work either). Non-Nokia-made handsets generally refused to share their memory too.

If you happened to connect two USB on-the-go devices – it depends on which end the USB on-the-go cable is your “browsing” device to understand which opens which. By the way, a special USB-OTG-enabled cable like the one that came with the Nokia N8, is not included in the C3-01 Touch and Type’s box. You’ll have to buy one separately.

Anyway, the C3-01 successfully browsed the N8’s memory drive but, when we turned the connection the other way around, something odd happened. Both devices started flashing “Device not supported” warnings. So, your mileage may vary when using USB on-the-go to connect to other phones (both S40 and Symbian devices worked).

Wi-Fi connectivity is also at hand. In fact, the Wi-Fi is one of the key features of the Nokia C3-01 – it is one of the cheaper Wi-Fi enabled phones on the market.

The Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type also comes complete with a memory card slot. Coupled with a card reader it can usually give you the fastest data transfer rates.

And finally, there's the standard 3.5mm audio jack, which allows you to use your own headphones, but doesn't have TV-out functionality.

Good browser, small screen

Browsing the internet on the Nokia C3-01 is a pleasant experience. Even the most elaborate pages are rendered well and finding your way around is reasonably comfortable on the touch-enabled display.

    
The touch-enabled S40 web browser

As you might guess the virtual cursor is no more, but there is some familiar touch controls borrowed from Symbian S60 – the full screen switch and the zoom key. There is kinetic scrolling too, which works well enough.

The dedicated zoom key is the only zooming option – neither double tap nor the volume rocker works.

Despite the Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 support, Nokia C3-01 web browser doesn’t support Flash. If you want to watch some YouTube stuff you’ll have to rely on the mobile version of the website. Anyway, the lack of Flash is not a big deal, especially for that small screen and the hardware specs.

Like most other S40 phones, the Nokia C3-01 has the Opera Mini 5 browser preinstalled.

   

Social networking

Social networking has been creeping its way into Series 40 for a while, but this is probably the best implementation we’ve seen yet. The key differentiator here between the C3-01 and the C3 (the non-touch one) is the touch screen – Facebook has so many features that it’s impossible to have a simple interface. Which is where the touch screen comes in – it makes interactions much simpler.

In the Nokia C3-01 the Communities app is the SNS central. It handles both Facebook and Twitter accounts, including several accounts of each type (though only one Facebook and one Twitter account can be connected at a time).

The Facebook section supports the full communication capabilities of the site. You can view messages and events, friend requests and event invitations. Write on people’s wall and browse their profiles, post photos (either from the Gallery or you can snap a new one on the spot), post status updates, read news feeds and follow groups.

    
The dedicated Facebook app

Twitter is an inherently simpler service but the app has plenty of features too. You can update your status, check your @mentions, send direct messages and reply to tweets too.

One cool thing is the Shorten links button – Twitter will shorten links automatically, but only after you send the tweet. Shorten links will use bit.ly to shorten links beforehand and give you a few extra characters.

    
The Twitter app

We found two things missing from the Twitter part of the app. The first one was support for retweeting. The other is an option to upload a photo to TwitPic and its likes and have the URL for that photo embedded into the tweet automatically.

S40 doesn’t have multitasking, even in this touch-enabled incarnation, but you can still receive updates even when you exit the Communities app. Put the Communities tab on the homescreen and pick a default account and you’re good to go.

   
Communities on the homescreen • picking a main account • settings

The default account is what you see first when you start the app (so if you only have a Facebook account, you don’t have to tap the Facebook tab every time). Also, only the updates from the main account will be visible on the homescreen. You can also set the time to receive new updates – say, from 8:00 to 22:00.

Final words

The premium looks and excellent build quality are a nice place for the Nokia C3-01 to start. Things are looking good for the whole Touch and Type concept too – there’s nowhere else to go for a set with both touchscreen and a numpad. This doesn’t mean the Touch and Type phones are free of competition. In fact, they will need to work hard to convince users. Especially those considering a smartphone or a full-touch handset.

Affordable smartphones and touchscreen feature phones will be the main source of pressure for the Touch and Type lineup. And since affordable smartphones are a Nokia specialty – the real competition is perhaps limited to the likes of the Corby and the Cookie – and all the sequels that followed.

There’s a very clear distinction though: the Corbies and the Cookies of the world are for the young. The Touch and Type will likely appeal to a more grown-up audience, and more mature tastes. We guess Nokia must‘ve been thinking: “There’s no room for more touchscreen dumbphones. Let’s do something else instead, something we’re good at anyway.”

And that’s where S40 makes a lot of sense. The C3-01 is part of a new beginning but tradition is what will draw returning customers. Touch and Type will certainly be hoping to recapture the magic that made the Nokia 6300 and the 6700 classic what they are.

Touchscreen is only part of the S40 evolution. Handsets like the Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type are trying to give you more bang for your buck. High-speed network data, WLAN and USB-on-the-go are great things to have – especially considering that S40 is still falling short on other key features such as multitasking and smart dialing.

But then, there’s more than one way to make up for the failings. It’s not every day that we meet such a perfectly manufactured device. The Nokia C3-01 is made entirely of metal and the gaps between the parts are so tiny, it’s almost a unibody. The phone is hard to resist and you’ll know it the moment you open the box.

As for competition, there’s no point looking for rivals that fit the Touch and Type description. The likes of the Sony Ericsson Aino and the LG KF750 Secret are hardly relevant here. The meaningful competition is somewhere between entry level smartphones and touch and non-touch dumbphones.

Nokia X3-02 is the first and obvious competitor. It packs exactly the same specs, but offers different colors and unique redesigned keypad. There are dedicated messaging and media keys too, but the battery is not as capable as the C3-01 one. Oh, and it’s €10 cheaper.

 
Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type

The candybars Sony Ericsson Elm and Nokia 6700 classic are worth your thought too. Both of them are feature phones with small displays, and both have great 5-megapixel autofocus snappers. There's plenty of metal used on both of them too. Unfortunately the classic Finn lacks WLAN support but makes up for it with free navigation with Nokia Maps.

  
Sony Ericsson Elm • Nokia 6700 classic

You may also want to check the smarty Nokia C5 running on Symbian S60. It has a few drawbacks - the lack of Wi-Fi and the poor camera - but looks classy and resembles the classic Nokia design.

 
Nokia C5

There are a few smartphones that also worth mentioning.

The original LG GT540 Optimus and the recently released Optimus One P500 run on the Android Eclair and Android Froyo respectively. Both pack everything that the today’s smartphone requires and are quite popular in their class. The Optimus is quite cheap today with its €130 price tag but you’ll have to settle with a resistive touchscreen. On the other hand, the Optimus One bets on the capacitive technology but it will cost you about €220.

  
LG GT540 Optimus • LG P500 Optimus One

In the Nokia camp we find the 5530 XpressMusic, which comes with a bigger, higher-res screen, an auto-focus 3MP camera and 4GB microSD in the box. The Symbian S60-powered Nokia 5530 can be yours for €160 – the same as the C3-01.

 
Nokia 5530 XpressMusic

Whatever the competition, Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type has everything to become a best-seller and the price is more than reasonable. We fell in love with its design and build quality, and we certainly hope to see more handsets by Nokia with the same design theme.