Nokia C3

The C3 is a phone designed for the general consumer market, and in particular for users who do a lot of e-mailing, texting and social networking. It's slim, light and has a sleek brushed metal rear casing. In fact, it's really quite an attractive phone, although not everyone in our office was a fan of our test model's hot pink finish. It's certainly an eye-catching shade, but at least Nokia is daring to be different with colours that make this mobile stand out from the crowd!

The C3 is the latest model in a line of prestigious Nokia handsets initially aimed at business users. In 2009, the E71 (one of the C3's predecessors) was already praised for its high-quality metal finish, its smooth and seamless OS and for its very professional handling of users' various e-mail accounts. All of these qualities have been handed down to the C3, but the new handset has also been updated to cater for social networking.


The idea behind the C3 seems to have been to take a successful professional handset and to add all the ingredients of a consumer smartphone. It's a nice idea, but Nokia appears to have forgotten that in the meantime, market standards have shot up. Unfortunately, next to today's all-singing all-dancing handsets, the C3 looks like it's stuck in 2009.

We have to admit that we shuddered when we fired up the web browser, as the C3 surfs with Edge connectivity! For a mobile aimed at people who are constantly communicating, the absence of 3G is somewhat surprising. Obviously, web browsing is pretty slow as a result. Typically, loading up the DigitalVersus homepage (approximately 79 KB to download) takes around 40 seconds while a 3G phone on the same network only takes 20 seconds.


The screen is sufficiently bright and the contrast is fine, but 2.4 inches and 320 x 240 pixels is a bit tight for reading e-mails, browsing dozens of status updates, posting on social networks etc. In fact, you have to wonder whether it was really such a good idea to bring all these consumer functions to a purely pro phone. The low-def screen doens't exactly make you want to spend time surfing the web and its only potential advantage is that it goes easy on the battery (1320 mAh). Plus, the screen only displays 262,000 colours instead of 16 million, and you can really tell, as shading or fading colours just don't look accurate.


Another nasty surprise is that the built-in camera has a resolution of just 2 Megapixels. The E71 already had a very bad 3-Megapixel camera and a measly internal memory of 55 MB so we were hoping to see an improvement in the C3!

On the whole then, we're not all that impressed with the Nokia C3.