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When we first saw the Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type we have to admit we were a little bit excited. We wanted to see Nokia give its solid, low-cost candybar phone a boost by adding touch, and wondered what else might be here into the bargain.
In the end, though, S40 6th Edition is reminiscent of S60 5th Edition – a fair effort, but nothing special, and we reckon it's easily bettered.
We liked
The nice build quality is great – especially the metal parts of the chassis, which make the Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type feel comfy to hold and give it the armoury to take a few knocks.
The large number pad makes for fast tapping out of SMS messages both one-handed and two-thumbed.
The idea of putting a touch screen onto S40 is a clever one, because it reinvigorates that old, old Symbian platform, bringing it into the modern phone age.
We disliked
The processor seems challenged at times. We found it was slow to drop down the shortcuts menu from the main screen and slow to pan in web pages, in particular.
Twitter and Facebook integration is rudimentary at best, and in neither app can you see enough data on screen at any one time. There's been no attempt to let you bring your online contacts into the handset contact list, either.
The tedium of having to quit apps before moving on, for example the Opera web browser, just doesn't wash in these days of multitasking handsets. Nor does the lack of multitasking and app switching.
Verdict
The Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type is a handset which ultimately disappoints. We like the build, and admire what Nokia has tried to do in reinvigorating S40 by adding touch. But we think the Finnish manufacturer's crown may have slipped in the execution of its idea.
Much as we realise some people do just want a phone for making calls and a bit of SMS, we can't help feeling that you can get a lot more phone for less money and then pick and choose the bits of it you actually want to use.
Go for the Orange San Francisco, for example, on pay as you go, and you pay £99 for a phone that has a bigger screen for web browsing, GPS, capacitive touchscreen technology and the great flexibility of Android. Seems like a no-brainer to us.
