Nokia C3 Preview
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Nokia C3 Preview

The soon to be released Nokia C3 is another Nokia S40 phone which has a QWERTY keypad and is aimed mainly at heavy texters and social networking addicts. It resembles the E series heavyweights like the Nokia E71 and Nokia E72 in terms of form but is way underpowered. It has the bare necessities but then we cannot really complain, as it is priced accordingly. It is a really cheap way to stay connected while on the move, without spending much.

Design

The Nokia C3 has a nice design with rounded edges. It is slightly bulky with most of the space being occupied by the 2.4 inch display and the QWERTY keypad. The build quality is pretty good and the phone is quite sturdy. It has dimensions of 115.5 x 58.1 x 13.6 mm and weighs around 114 gms.

It has a decent 2.4 inch TFT display like all the other QWERTY Nokia phones with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and supports 256K colors like other S40 phones. The display quality is quite nice and the sunlight legibility is good.

User Interface

It has the familiar S40 interface which even my grandmother can easily figure out in a matter of minutes. It has the same active standby screen which has shortcuts to your favorite apps. It also has Twitter and Facebook integration so you can view your status updates directly on your homescreen. It supports Java J2ME MIDP 2.0 apps and should come with the Ovi Store installed.

It has 55 MB internal memory and supports microSD cards up to 16 GB.

Multimedia

The Nokia C3 has the standard S40 image gallery application and music and video players built in. It supports the MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA audio formats and 3GP and MP4 video by default.

It has an average 2 MP camera which can take shots at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels. It can capture video at a QCIF resolution at 15 FPS. It would be safe to not expect much from the camera.

Connectivity

It has just the basic connectivity options - GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g. It also has Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 support. It doesn’t have 3G connectivity which is a downer. It comes with Opera Mini installed which is one of the best mobile browsers. You can also install other J2ME browsers like UCWEB etc.

It has a 1320 mAh Li-ion battery which has a rated talktime of 7 hrs.

Conclusion

For its price, it is quite a decent buy. It’s great for those who don’t need a smartphone but do a lot of messaging and are hooked to Twitter and Facebook. It competes with phones like the INQ Chat and the Peek, but offers much more than them.