With Nokia struggling in the smartphone market and not expected to make any major inroads till they get out their WP7 offerings phone out, it seems they have decided to concentrate on the low cost phone segment for now where they were losing out to smaller players which played their “Dual SIM” cards well to steal a healthy market share from Nokia in this segment rapidly.
So Nokia has managed to launch some dual SIM handsets in the C series and Nokia C2-03 are touch and type, dual SIM device with Easy Swap for the second SIM. So lets take a look at how the C2-03 fares the test:
In the Box:
- Nokia C2-03 handset
- 1020 mAh Li-Ion battery
- MicroUSB cable
- 2GB memory card
- Standard pin charger
- HS-125 headset
Design and Build:
The Nokia C2-03 is a slider phone with a touchscreen. It has a metallic finish with a little gloss at the bottom of the phone which is a fingerprint magnet but let me assure you that the body is all plastic. The front of the device houses a 2.6″ resistive TFT screen and just has the call and disconnect buttons below the display, with the disconnect button doubling up as the switch on/off button.
The left side of the phone houses the hot swappable SIM 2 slot while on the right hand side, you have the volume keys and the lock button.
The back of the phone houses a 2MP camera (without Flash light) and the speaker. There is no dedicated camera button, given the camera is only 2MP you don’t need it either.
The keypad of the phone is soft plastic and will take little getting used to, in order to come up to the regular typing speeds. Overall the phone feels pretty solid in the hand and has an attractive design.
Here, is a quick look at the unboxing of the Nokia C2-03 and its hardware in the video below:
Performance:
Dual SIM
When you switch on the phone, we observed that it takes a little longer to boot up than other low end Nokia devices in its league. And being a dual SIM device, that is the first thing we decided to put to the test. The Easy Swap on the C2-03 works really well and the phone reads the new SIM pretty quickly, and its ready to use within a few seconds.
Though, interestingly the C2-03 does not read the secondary SIM card without the primary being inserted behind the battery i.e. the SIM2 will not function if SIM1 is not inserted in the phone. You would also be fairly disappointed to know that the C2-03 only functions as a dual SIM only in standby and its NOT ‘dual SIM active’ i.e. once you are on a call on any one of the SIM the other automatically gets deactivated and when dialed shows unavailable till the duration of the call. It seems Nokia still doesn’t have a dual SIM phone in which both the SIM’s function together.
There is an interesting SIM manager app which lets you select the preferred SIM for outgoing communications. Thus, you can divide and assign different tasks like calls, messaging, and data between the two SIM’s.
Touch & Type
Coming to the touch and type functionality on the device it reminds us of the Nokia E6. And similarly here also you cannot control the phone wholly using the keypad only as the options and exit buttons are placed on the touch screen thus forcing you to use the touch often. There are other small things like the lack of function to forward music by just dragging the timeline. Instead, you can only use the forward / rewind touch buttons on the screen to skip thus making touch almost redundant here. Overall the touchscreen feels a little sluggish and unresponsive a lot more times which is quite obvious as it is a resistive screen.
Multi-Media
The C2-03 has a 2MP camera with no auto-focus. We found the performance of the camera pretty average and coupled with the image editor it is pretty decent for a low budget phone. Though I must add that the gallery is a little slow in indexing and the images show up in the gallery after OS refreshes itself with a slight delay.
Camera Samples:
The video camera is a basic one and the output quality of the videos left us far from impressed. The videos are too pixellated to our liking, also the sharpness and saturation of colors was very low. You will definitely not find yourself taking a lot of videos from this phone.
A Video Sample:
The speaker on the back of the device is surprisingly quite loud much like the other low end devices in the market though they perform slightly better as the sound is clear even at high volumes though I must add that you might feel that the speaker is spitting blaring music at you. The earphones bundled with the device are usual standard ones which are average.
Besides we also noticed that the phone tends to lad at times and also keeps refreshing itself at regular intervals which can be a bit annoying at times.
Conclusion:
To begin with the conclusion, the C2-03 is attractively priced at Rs. 4949 and boasts of some good features for the price tag. Though the phone has an attractive design and a solid finish its Dual SIM Easy Swap functionality remains the strongest selling point. You might well consider the Motorola EX119 over the C2-03 if the QWERTY design isn’t on your blacklist.
Also the fact, that you cannot control the device only using the keyboard also might put off some of you and using both the touch and type to control the device might take a little getting used to and you might find yourself wishing that the C2-03 had a five way D-pad.
You might want to buy it only if you are looking for a low budget phone of quality and your brand preference starts from Nokia.
