Nokia C7-00

Nokia is hoping that its new C7 smartphone can make a small dent in the market for mid-range smartphones with plenty of multimedia capabilities, a segment that's currently dominated by the iPhone, Android and several other players.  With an 8 Megapixel camera (plus a front-facing camera), 8 GB of internal memory (and room for more) and a GPS, it still isn't quite as powerful as the older N8, which has a 12 Megapixel camera, 16 GB of internal memory and a HDMI port.  It's already going for a song with a contract, but is this second attempt at a Symbian^3 phone a success?  The OS is hardly known as a model of usability ...

Charm offensive

Although it's all plastic apart from some metal trim at the front, the C7 has a great finish and feels solid.  It's small and lightweight enough to sit easily in your hands, and cuts a slim figure with a slight curve.  This look marks a change for the Finnish phone giant, whose handsets are usually a lot chunkier.  In fact, the C7 is probably the most attractive handset in Nokia's current range.

The 3.5'' AMOLED display has a 360 x 640 pixel resolution and offers pretty good results overall.  The contrast is more than acceptable and colour reproduction is generally accurate, for a mobile at least.  The glossy finish, however, is soon covered with greasy fingerprints.

OS: Better stability, but still needs more usability

It probably isn't worth dedicating too much time to talking about Nokia's own OS, Symbian 3, which has been slightly improved since the earlier version.  Let's recap quickly what we said in our review of the N8: without a fundamental redesign of the entire system, users are stuck with a very counter-intuitive interface featuring menus that are clearly showing their age, despite an obvious effort to simplify the options available.

Today's fastest mobile phones have 1 GHz processors, but the C7's ARM CPU runs at a 'mere' 680 MHz.  It didn't really show any signs of struggling during our tests, even when we were multitasking or using multimedia.  It's not the fastest phone in the world either though.


Some apps take longer than they should to launch, and the same is true of passing from one of the three home screens to another, or when scrolling through a web page.  It is worth pointing out that the system is more stable now than it used to be.


Internet and camera less impressive

The camera performs less well than the one on the N8, largely due to the lack of autofocus, which means you can expect blurry shots.  When you look closely at the detail in your photos, it quickly becomes obvious that there's a lot fewer them—and they're a lot less sharp—than in photos from the N8.  Most colours have a blue tinge, giving a rather cold feel.  Finally, if you're somewhere dark, you should probably not even bother as the LED flash really isn't much help.














Video playback is decent overall, with native support for DivX and XviD, as wel has 720p  HD video.

The C7 has its own FM transmitter, meaning you can play music and broadcast it to your home stereo or car radio.


The C7 clearly can't hope to beat the best mobile browsers of the moment—iPhone, Opera or Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7—and when it renders pages it often resizes them rather arbitrarily.  It can, however, play Flash content, but anybody who does a lot of web browsing will look elsewhere.

This phone produces decent sound, but like everything else, the speakers are lacking in power.  As ever, we can only recommend you ditch the headphones that are supplied as your own will be much better.

The C7 does well with battery life, despite only have 1200 mAh to play with, mostly down to Symbian, which isn't particularly demanding.  We easily managed to use it for two days of ordinary usage (videos, music, web browsing, social networks, calls, texts and GPS) before we needed to plug it in.