If you were a fan of Nokia’s top-notch basic handsets during the 90s, you’ll be pleased to see it launch the C3-01 Touch and Type. While it looks like a standard candybar device, it actually has a touch-screen instead of your average screen. And this results in one of the most efficient handsets we’re seen from the Finnish phone maker in some time.

Looking good

Nokia has done well with the hardware. The phone is lightweight but manages not to seem cheap. It’s slim, with an aluminium chassis and good-sized keys, along with that capacitive display. There is no D-pad of course, which helps the minimalist design – instead navigation comes courtesy of the 2.4in display. The combination of keypad and touch-screen works well together – it makes sense to select icons on the display with a finger and then use hard keys for calls and texts.

All the standard functions work well and you’ll find you only need to make the minimum number of clicks to call and text.

It’s nice to see a 3.5mm audio jack on a basic handset, but if you want to store music you’ll need to buy yourself a microSD card, as the onboard memory is a measly 30MB. You can add up to 32GB more with a microSD card, and the slot has been well placed so that you don’t have to take out the battery to swap cards.

Back to basics

The phone is built on Symbian S40, which is Nokia’s own software designed for its non-smartphones. You’ll find one home screen with space for four toolbars – favourite contacts, time/date, and a customisable shortcut bar, on which you can add anything from calendar, mail, chat, notes, communities and notifications, or a set of hot links to Twitter and Facebook.

Tap on the time and you’ll enter the clock app, which allows you to set an alarm. Tap on the date, meanwhile, and you’ll find a really intuitive calendar. We found the touch-screen pretty responsive, although you’ll find yourself tapping harder than you would on an iPhone, for instance,  scrolling is a bit on the jerky side.

The only downside is that, should you want to customise your shortcut bar or home screen, you’ll have to delve around in the rather hidden settings menu to do so – that’s if you can work out what you need to do.

Of course, back in the day this is how handsets worked, but times have moved on and it would have been nice to be able to customise the shortcut bar from the home screen. If you’re not keen on this – head into the settings menu and turn off ‘home screen mode’ and you’ll be greeted with a grid-style menu screen instead.

Snapper and net

The phone boasts a dedicated shutter button, so it feels like using a real camera when you take a picture. The five-megapixel snapper does produce rather faded shots indoors, despite its LED flash, but we were pretty pleased with our outside pictures. They can all be sent via email, Bluetooth and MMS, although there’s no facility for uploading them to social network sites.

The email and web facilities are quite basic and you may be disappointed with how non-mobile sites show in the browser. Having said that, thanks to high-speed HSDPA internet and touch-screen navigation, it’s one of the best internet user experiences we’ve found on a basic handset.

While it is possible to load Gmail, Hotmail and Microsoft Exchange email accounts onto the device, the mail program is not able to run in the background. This means you’ll only receive email when you are actually running the app.

However, it’s a comprehensive program for such a little handset, and if you use Hotmail it’s also possible to run your Windows Live Messenger chat account.

It goes without saying that, thanks to the fact it has few really advanced features, the C3-01 does not use a lot of power, and a fully charged battery will last a good few days.

The verdict

Nokia has always been famed for its standard handsets, and the C3-01 Touch and Type offers a new twist on the old favourite. The capacitive touch-screen offers a new lease of life to what is a tried-and-tested handset, making its standard facilities and basic web browsing offerings more than usable.