The full Nokia C3 review and specification

Youth-orientated social networking phones are everywhere at the moment, and the latest contender in the crowded arena is the Nokia C3. It’s the first phone in Nokia’s low-priced Cseries to have Facebook and Twitter and while that sound promising, it’s all-too-obviously a low-cost device.

Style and handling on the Nokia C3

Design-wise, the Nokia C3 looks fantastic, with the professional stylings of Nokia’s E3 series. Despite its lightweight plastic cover, its matte finish looks stylish. Below the 2.4-inch display sit a D-pad, call and call end keys, two option keys and two customisable shortcut keys.

Below these is a four-line QWERTY keyboard that is one of the best we’ve seen on a low-priced handset.The camera is a basic two-megapixel model with no flash or autofocus. You’ve got no chance of night or inside shots, and even pictures taken in broad daylight come out quite soft, albeit it with pretty good colours. You can upload them directly but only to Flickr, oddly not Facebook, or you can send them via MMS, email or Bluetooth.

As for internet, you get EDGE speeds rather than 3G, but Wi-Fi is included, which is impressive. This means that uploading and downloading is a speedy affair. You can’t run social network apps in the background, though, so there are no push notifications of events. 

Social networking on the Nokia C3

There are three shortcuts areas the homepage that you can customise with your most-used contacts, your calendar, a toolbar that links to all applications and Communities, which contains the Facebook and Twitter apps. These are both fairly full featured: Facebook links to everything you’d expect on a desktop and includes a list of events showing what you have been invited to over a ten-day period; Twitter is also a desktop-like view, showing direct messages, mentions and favourited tweets.

Once you have selected your account you can update directly from the home screen via the Communities icon.But despite the two apps’ features, they both run painfully slowly, especially when scrolling. And this snail’s pace is the main problem with the C3 overall. We know it’s a budget phone and didn’t expect brilliant multitasking capabilities, but... For example, press the call end button and you’ll get a message asking if you really want to close the app. Pressing any button results in a one-second delay, and programs take some time to load up. It all amounts to a frustrating experience.

Internet on the Nokia C3

We’re happy to see that Nokia has embedded the superb Opera Mini browser, which really makes the best of low-specced phones. Pages load quite quickly despite a slight delay when typing in search terms or URLs. There is a zoom box (no keys) that lets you go from viewing the page at full page to 100% which does a pretty good job at making non-optimised sites readable, but this is really only a phone for quickly looking up info.

Dedicated browsers look elsewhere. In common with many Nokia phones, loading your contacts on to the Nokia C3 is no picnic – you somehow have to sync them with Ovi suite first. Ovi Mail means you can add any webmail account; it’s basic, with no push notification, but does the job well if you just want to check your mail on the move. The QWERTY keyboard makes messaging quick and easy.

The verdict on the Nokia C3

The Nokia C3 only costs £80 on prepay, so you can’t expect anything high-end for that price. Its looks are high-end and stylish, and it’s easy to use. The Facebook and Twitter apps work well but the whole experience is marred by its slow performance.