Nokia C2-03 Review

FULL REVIEW

Dual-SIM mobile phones are a hit in the Indian market, there are a bunch of devices which come with this feature (most of them from local manufacturers), but none are as useful as the Nokia C2-03. This is also a touch-and-type based device from Nokia which comes with the most innovative dual-SIM features.

Design

The Nokia C2-03 is a very generic C-series Nokia mobile phone. It has a plastic body, rounded edges and a slide-out keypad. The slider is expected to be long lasting and it is quite smooth, but it does make a loud noise while opening and closing. It has a rich feeling to it thanks to the matte finish on the back and a glossy band at the bottom. It has a connect and disconnect button on the front, a volume rocker and the unlock button on the right, secondary SIM card slot on the left and a 3.5mm jack, charger pin and USB port to connect to a computer on the top.

The build quality is excellent. The device is designed to resist dust, it can handle a few accidental drops and slips from your pocket. Overall the build quality is good, however this is a slider device and those who have used one before may very well be aware that the slider will go bad eventually.

Interface

The phone has a 2.6-inch TFT LCD touchscreen display with 240 x 320 pixel resolution and a pixel density of 154 ppi. It is a resistive touchscreen display and using it is really frustrating as it is laggy and I had to search for an old stylus to get better response from the touchsreen.

The keypad on the Nokia C2-03 is good but you cannot be completely dependent on the keypad to navigate through the device. It has good spacing between the keys, horizontally as well as vertically but it feels a bit tiny though and may get uncomfortable for those who use both their hands for typing on an alphanumerical mobile keypad.

Software Interface

The C2-03 is based on S40 mobile operating system, and Nokia it includes a brand new look which resembles Nokia's new Symbian Anna mobile operating system, of course it does not include all the features of the latter. The icons look well detailed, and the UI very easy to understand and simple to navigate through. It is not very fast, nor very slow. It is somewhere between a smartphone UI and a mobile phone UI, but inclining more towards the latter.

The best feature on the device has to do with its dual-SIM capability. It allows users to personalize the device for up to five SIMs and easily swap between secondary SIM cards without the need of switching of or restarting the mobile phone. The phone remembers these customizations and upon swapping the card it automatically loads the preferred settings.

The phone comes with a pre-loaded maps application which turned out to be extremely slow and it seems the browser to stop you from going online. It is an ugly and sluggish experience.

Multimedia

It has a multi format audio player and is known to support AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, MP3 and AMR-NB. The sound quality on loudspeaker as well as earphones is decent, but we have seen much better from Nokia. It also includes FM radio which is one key entertainer on this device.

The device comes with a 2 megapixel full focus camera which is as good as useless. It has no flash, so there is no point taking images in the night and when in light the images are low in detail and quite grainy. It records videos at QICF resolution at 15 fps and there is nothing good about it.

Call Performance

Being a dual-SIM mobile phone, the Nokia C2-03 allows the device to be connected to two different networks at the same time. However, there is no dual-SIM standby feature which keeps the other SIM active even though you are on a call on the first one. The signal strength is normal, it is under coverage under most places and voice quality is clean and distortion-free on both ends.

Battery Life

The Nokia C2-03 is big on battery and that is something you won’t find with most of its competitors. On an average it provided about 6 hours of talktime, with the occasional music playback. Including calls, music playback, a bit of web browsing and a bit of map reading the phone goes up for around 2 days between charges.

Conclusion

A good phone for those who want a quality dual-SIM capable smartphone, but if you are looking for more features and can spend extra money on dual-SIM then you have Android-based devices available in the market.