Introduction
Touchscreen and a hardware numpad in a slider form factor, complete with dual-SIM support - the Nokia C2-03 will be stepping on many toes. It's a phone that knows its place though and has no problem living within its own means.
The C2-03 is a device that's simple to use, easy to afford and comfortable to carry around. You have two active phone lines in the same device so you can leave your other phone at home. Touchscreen and dual SIM support is a rare combination, but Nokia must think it's time they added more depth to their entry-level lineup.Key features
- Dual-SIM, dual-standby phone
- Dual-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- 2.6" 256K-color resistive TFT QVGA touchscreen
- S40 6th edition
- 2 megapixel fixed-focus camera
- QCIF video recording at 15fps
- Stereo FM radio with RDS, Visual radio
- Bluetooth v2.1 (with A2DP)
- Standard microUSB port
- microSD card slot (32 GB supported, 2GB included)
- 3.5mm audio jack
- Extra smooth and precise haptic feedback
- Attractive price
Main disadvantages
- No Wi-Fi
- Camera is poor
- QCIF video recording would be better off missing
- Doesn’t charge off USB
- No screen brightness control
- No document viewer
- No smart dialing
- No accelerometer sensor
- No multitasking
So what does the C2-03 offer over the C2-02, which we recently reviewed? A second SIM slot, it's as simple as that. Enough though to make the C2-03 twice the phone the C2-02 is. The dual SIM solution is the same as on their other phones. The second SIM card is easily hot-swappable via a side-mounted slot and the SIM Manager app lets you decide how each card handles calling, texting and data.
We cannot overlook the fact that the list of cons is almost as long as that of the pros. Plain to see, this phone sacrifices a lot to keep its price competitive.
There's a lot missing but the basics are duly covered. Calling and texting come first in the low-end, touchscreen is a bonus feature. The C2-03 succeeds at putting them together in a single package. It gives you advanced calling on two SIM cards and a decent keypad for the messaging. And builds on that knowing that mindful of budget doesn't mean unwilling to try new things.
It's high-end smartphones that get most of the hype but Nokia are keen to tighten their grip on the bread-winning lower end of the market. Being a viable update alternative in emerging markets, the C2-03 can be one of the weapons they need to fight and win their battles.Design and construction
The Nokia C2-03 keeps a low profile, nothing fancy in terms of finish. The rounded shape, the faux-metal at the bottom and the matte plastic go well together to give the C2-03 a mature look, even if perhaps a little too conservative.
The Nokia C2-03 has a 2.6” touchscreen of QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels). The image quality is unimpressive with contrast, brightness and viewing angles all failing to impress.
At 153 ppi it isn't the sharpest tool in the shed but in its quiet low-end spot it shouldn't face too much opposition. It's an affordable phone and that means compromises have to be made.
Although a resistive unit, the screen is pleasingly responsive. Nokia's unmatched haptic feedback comes as a bonus: soft gentle vibrations acknowledge your input and it's always the part of the screen that's right under your thumb that vibrates.
There’s no manual brightness setting in the Nokia C2-03 and there’s no ambient light sensor either. The brightness level stays at a fixed level all the time.
Below the display we find the Call and End buttons, while the earpiece is the only thing above it on the front panel. The two call keys are placed on a single thin piece of glossy plastic that's almost level with the surface around it. The buttons, big enough for comfortable press, are placed right above a subtle chin, which makes them easier to locate by touch.
Sliding up reveals 12 more keys set in four rows of three – the standard alphanumeric layout. It's a flat keypad but thin grooves run vertically and across to set each button apart. The decent stroke is enough to give reasonable typing speeds.
On the left side of the Nokia C2-03, under a plastic lid you'll find the secondary SIM card slot. It's hot swappable, meaning a new SIM inserted is instantly accessible without a reboot.
The right-hand side of the phone is busier, with the volume rocker, screen lock slider and the lanyard eyelet.
At the top you get the 3.5mm audio jack, the standard microUSB port and the 2mm Nokia charger plug. The C2-03 doesn't have USB charging enabled.
At the back, the loudspeaker grill is next to the 2 megapixel camera lens. The lens is huge, but if you are interested in cellphones enough to be reading this site, you’d certainly know better than to expect miracles from a 2 megapixel fixed-focus snapper.
Removing the back cover reveals the 1020 mAh BL-5C Li-Ion battery that is said to last up to 600 hours of stand-by or up to 5 hours of talk time on a single charge. In real life we managed to get it going for almost four days, but that’s mainly because there’s not too much to do with the C2-03 besides calling.
The microSD card slot is under the battery so hot-swap is out of the question.
Overall, the Nokia C2-03 seems pretty solid and we are confident that it will last in the long run. Parts of the finish do look prone to scratches, and you do have the fingerprint issues, but even if looks do fade with time, the handset should last.
Series 40 goes touch
The Nokia C2-03 runs Series 40 software, which feels very familiar even in its touch-enabled iteration. There have been some changes since the previous batch of S40 touch phones but most of those run only skin deep like the refreshed icons, a la Symbian-Anna. In all fairness, we gotta say we found some usability improvements too, like the homescreen swipes.
Active standby mode (or Home screen mode, as Nokia call it here) is available as usual. It divides the screen into four sections, each of which is effectively a widget. The top row of the screen is reserved for status indicators (time, signal, etc.).
By default, the clock is on top, followed by Communities (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr integration) and two Shortcut bars at the bottom, each of which grants instant access to four favorite functions or apps.
There are two swipe gestures available on the homescreen. Pushing left or right swipe can be set to launch an app (both native and Java) or change the phone profile. By default, a left swipe opens the message composer and a right swipe opens the Java apps and games folder.
There‘s no D-pad on the Nokia C2-03 but the soft keys are there. Only virtual this time – they’re at the bottom of the screen, and there’s a virtual Menu key between them. The soft keys are user-configurable – you can assign a shortcut of choice to each of them.
The main menu has only two views – Grid and List. The grid layout is handy for offering numpad shortcuts.
The familiar Go To shortcut is available and it's yet another way to add shortcuts to the homescreen. It’s the kind of quick menu we’ve seen on many S40 handsets but touchscreen makes so much difference. It offers quick access to nine shortcuts.
The lockscreen on the Nokia C2-03 pretty standard – a clock and a tap-to-unlock key.
One thing missing is an accelerometer. Unlike some of its S40 non-touch siblings, the Nokia C2-03 leaves out features like tap-for-time and turn-to-mute. As for screen auto rotation, it’s not badly missed we think, given the screen size. Some might still find it a nuisance though – having to manually set display orientation where it matters: in the camera viewfinder, image gallery and the video player.
The biggest omission as usual is multitasking - we gave up hope that Nokia will add that a long time ago. This leads to bottlenecks - the Communities app takes at least 10 seconds to start up and a couple of seconds to shut down.
You can't leave it running in the background. You have to go through that every time you want to do something with the app, except check the latest notification (notifications do come in the background and only the last one is displayed).
A persistent impression of the Nokia C2-0 software is that it's running on hardware that can't quite handle everything and animations are always choppy. Throwing in multitasking would probably have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
A familiar phonebook
The phonebook of the Nokia C2-03 will store about 2000 contacts depending on the fields you use, which isn’t as good as unlimited storage but should do for most of the users out there. You can set the phonebook to display contacts from the phone memory, SIM memory or both. You can select which SIM numbers you want to see or you can opt to see all the numbers in both SIMs.
Adding a contact is simple and straightforward – the phone asks for number, first and last name and that’s it. When you need to add other details you can always go back and edit the contact. The phonebook can be set up to automatically store new contacts in a chosen location (phone, SIM1, SIM2) or to always ask.
Each contact can be assigned a variety of fields but the phone numbers are limited to 5. First names are separated from last names, eliminating problems, which may occur with synchronization. You can assign ringtones to each contact.
A handy shortcut in the Options menu for each contact brings up the SMS communication you've had with that contact.
The phone book has search functionality and kinetic scrolling. Contacts can be copied, moved or deleted either individually or in bulk.Calling on two SIM cards
To make a call, you need to select which SIM the phone should use. You can set a default SIM, which will always be used for calls. Or you can have the phone prompt you to choose manually every time.
To bring up the SIM management menu, press and hold the * key. Selecting a default SIM for messages works the same way so you can have one SIM for calling and the other for texting. You can also toggle the standby mode - dual SIM, or either of the two SIMs (for power saving). Each SIM can have its own ringtone.
The Nokia C2-03 can remember up to 5 SIMs - each SIM can have a name and an icon. This gives you easy at-a-glance info about which SIMs are currently inside the phone, no need to pop open the back and remove the battery just to check that.
Video player handles MP4/3GP only
When we tested the first batch of touch-enabled S40 Nokias, their video player surprised us with its capabilities - it played XviD reasonably well.
But the Nokia C2-03 can't. In fact, the only things we got to play were QVGA videos in MP4 or 3GP format. That's it - higher-res videos wouldn’t play, and neither did XviD videos.
The controls of the player are rather simple - you get a play/pause button along with previous and next buttons and also a full screen option.
The Nokia C2-03 has a 2MP fixed-focus snapper that produces photos with maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200. The camera interface has been updated so it's a lot more like Symbian.
On the screen you get a column on the bottom/right (depending on camera orientation) with the virtual shutter key in the center and the back and options keys besides it. You can use the camera in portrait, but we really preferred landscape mode - it feels more natural and photos come out with the right orientation.
Anyway, a tap on the screen reveals more controls - indicators (photos remaining, resolution and white balance), digital zoom controls, and three shortcuts for video camera mode, gallery and self-timer. All these auto-hide so they don't take up space on the screen.
Going into the Options menu, you get a popup that looks like the one on Symbian. There are controls here for effects (greyscale, sepia, negative), white balance, a viewfinder grid and extended settings. The shortcuts in this popup can be re-arranged but you can't pull any of them out onto the viewfinder. This popup also features animations, but they are rather choppy.
The image quality is good for a fixed-focus 2MP unit. Photos are quite noisy but the post processing manages to mask a lot of it, at least in bright areas. Shadows however have tons of noise. Contrast and color rendering are good and the amount of captured detail is as much as you would expect from such a camera.
Video recording
Video recording isn't something the C2-03 is good at. It does QCIF at 15 fps, which is as basic as video recording gets on a phone.
It's hardly worth talking about image quality when you can barely make out what's in the video, so we won't even try. The videos are usable for MMS only but we wouldn't recommend even that. Still it's a budget phone and budget is what it offers.
Limited connectivity
The connectivity on the Nokia C2-03 is pretty basic: you get dual-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and that's it as far as cell networks are concerned. We were expecting at least quad-band support, but no.
The only other thing that belongs in the connectivity section of this review is Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP.
Unlike the C3-01 and X3-02, the C2-03 doesn’t have Wi-Fi. There's no USB On-The-Go support either and what's even worse is that the microUSB port won't charge the phone.
Nokia S40 browser has improved significantly
The Nokia C2-03 boasts a really cool new browser. Its start screen has the usual URL and search bars and three side-scrollable panes below, which are quite reminiscent of the Symbian homescreen (complete with the three dots at the bottom that indicate the current pane).
From left to right, the panes are History, Featured (lists popular sites in several categories) and Favorites.
One excellent new feature is the autosuggestions as you type in the URL - it lists recently visited sites and filters the list as you type. It even offers to save you a few clicks by guessing the ".com" at the end - Symbian^1 users can only wish their browser can do these things.
The browser uses the Opera Mini trick - compressing web pages on a dedicated server before sending them to the phone. Pages load quickly (even on EDGE) and don't waste much data. Image quality is adjustable (Best/Good/Average or No images).
Kinetic scrolling is available (relatively fast, not very smooth). You get only two zoom levels (again, just like Opera Mini) - page overview and zoomed in.Overall, the performance is not perfect (the start page UI is quite laggy) and we had some issues where instead of opening a page, the browser would spit out error 400 "Invalid request".
Despite the Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 support, Nokia C2-03 web browser doesn’t support Flash. If you want to watch some YouTube stuff you’ll have to rely on the mobile version of the website. Anyway, the lack of Flash is not a big deal, especially for that small screen and the hardware specs.
For now, we prefer to stick to Opera Mini 6.1 (which we had to download manually), which offers things like tabbed browsing and an on-screen QWERTY for text input. Still, with a bit more work, the new S40 browser by Nokia can become even better than Mini.
Organizer and apps
The organizer on the Nokia C2-03 Touch and Type is well stocked as usual and things have been touch optimized.
The Calendar starts off with the month view – when you press and hold, a bigger number will pop up just above your finger so you can aim easier. When there’s an event on that date, the event description will pop up instead (it’s not visible otherwise, just like in the old S40 version).
Day view is also available, but strangely, week view has gone missing. You have various kinds of events available – reminder, meeting call, birthday, anniversary and memo.
There are Notes and To-Do apps as well.
The alarm app uses the big, touchable numbers, making it easy to set and you can make it go off only on specific days. You can customize the snooze time too, but there’s only one alarm available.
The Nokia C2-03 touchscreen calculator is brand new but has lost the advanced functionality (you only get the four basic math functions). Doesn’t seem like a fair trade, considering we have the numbers on the keypad already.
The C2-03 comes with the traditional Converter app as well.
The World clock can tell the time in up to four cities. It offers a long list of supported cities, but there’s no search (so you have to scroll a lot for, say, Washington) and you can’t just tap on the map either.
In the Nokia C2-03 the Communities app is in charge of SNS. It handles both Facebook and Twitter accounts, including several accounts of each type (though only one Facebook and one Twitter account can be connected at a time). There's support for Flickr too.
The Facebook section supports most of the communication capabilities of the service. You can view messages and events, friend requests and event invitations. Write on people’s wall and browse their profiles, post photos (either from the Gallery or you can snap a new one on the spot), post status updates, read news feeds and follow groups.
Twitter is an inherently simpler service but the app has plenty of features too. You can update your status, check your @mentions, send direct messages and reply to tweets too. We missed automatic upload of photos though.The S40 Ovi Store
You can browse the apps available in the Ovi Store by categories – Applications, Games, Audio and Video content, Personalization; or by collections – currently only Go Green is available for S40 with just one app.
Your account profile keeps track of all the apps you have installed under My stuff. You can now also select where games and apps should be installed and where audio and video should go. That’s nice – we wish Android had that right from the start.
There are plenty of apps and games there, a lot of them free. They are still behind the big players in the app store game, but for a feature phone having an app store at all is more than we expected.
Nokia Maps for pedestrians
The Nokia C2-03 doesn’t have a GPS receiver but Nokia Maps can use Cell-ID to get your approximate location. The app doesn’t feature voice-guided navigation anyway and can only plan pedestrian routes. Routes are also limited in length to 10 miles.
So, even if you hook up a Bluetooth GPS receiver to the Nokia C2-03 it sill won't function as a car SatNav. There's no option for a paid upgrade either.
Maps are downloaded through your data connection, which is something else to keep in mind.
It's a nice bonus for such a low-level device, but including it probably had more to do with not using Google's solution than providing a good mapping solution.
A few games on board
The Nokia C2-03 came with six games pre-installed. They are Golf Tour, Memorize, Music Guess, Nature Park, Picture Puzzle and Solitaire.
Final words
Going for simplicity and affordability, the Nokia C2-03 is good at the basics. It's a dual-SIM by trade and Touch and type by name. A curious combination, whose success is by no means guaranteed. The C2-03 uses two tested recipes but the meal is not for traditional eaters.
A S40-powered feature phone, the C2-03 stays within budget. Familiarity is its main advantage. Yes, it's a cut above the typical entry-level handset but not in an arrogant way. The target is returning Nokia customers, who are willing to upgrade without breaking the bank. Those that aren't much into experimenting. The ones that would like to give touchscreen a try but wouldn't sacrifice a proper keypad. Texting is still important - life style and budget-wise.
Now, you can certainly get a better user experience elsewhere. There's no shortage of cheap touchscreen dumbphones and entry level smartphones are an increasingly popular option. It seems to us though the Nokia C2-03 need not fear competition. For one, the combination of touchscreen, keypad and dual SIM is hard to match. But more importantly, it will target users in markets dominated by the Finns.
It's not to say the competition is completely non-existent. Samsung has quite a few dual SIM alternatives to offer. The Star II DUOS and the Ch@t 222 fit the touchscreen bill too. The Star II Duos boasts a larger display of higher resolution and the much friendlier capacitive technology. It clearly has superior features and user experience but comes with a price tag of around $200.
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