I thought the Nokia C7 was beautifully crafted the moment I unboxed it and held it in my hands. Its simplicity in design—a sturdy aluminum candybar phone with a sleek black finish, a generous 3.5-inch screen encased with a mirror-like bezel, only 10.5mm thick and weighs 130g made the C7 an absolute wonder to behold (and hold). Of course, as I am naturally averse to anything that doesn’t have a tactile keypad, I was a bit intimidated having to work with a touchscreen. But the UI wasn’t all that unfamiliar and accessing the menu had simply been reduced to just one wide button below the vibrant AMOLED screen and in between the call and end-call buttons.
On top is your on button, 3.5mm jack for head/earphones, and a USB port with cover whereas on the phone’s right side (as there’s nothing on the left) is a voice-command button snuggled in between a volume adjustor, a phone lock switch, and a camera button which activates the C7’s 8-megapixel camera capable of HD-quality 720p video and equipped with a dual-LED flash at the back. The battery, microSD card and SIM card slots are safely kept within a thin, aluminum cover that is just as sturdy as the rest of the phone.
However, despite the phone’s external beauty, it still has a bit of a way to go if it wants to compete with other, more sophisticated smartphones. The performance and response is a bit slow, although I wouldn’t say it’s too significant a lag. The web browser takes a while to load and refreshing it can be a bit tedious. The design of the Symbian system and its core applications make it hard to recommend the C7 as a smartphone for someone with a busy email and social media life. We would recommend it to those who want a basic phone with a good web browsing experience and who likes to listen to music (the C7 makes for a pretty good music phone) especially since it’s got a great battery life that can last you almost two days.
Despite Symbian^3 being a clear improvement over its predecessors, it’s still evident the OS hasn’t been designed to maximize the benefits of a touchscreen. There is no QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode, the keys are fairly small and there are no intuitive, context-sensitive buttons. Symbian^3 also brings up a new screen when you have to enter text so you can’t see the messages you are replying to as you are typing despite already being able to see your messages in “conversation” form.
What’s Hot:
Battery life
Good sound quality
Great design
What’s Not:
Camera isn’t great
Sluggish
Texting is a bit of a chore
Bottomline:
Though we wouldn’t recommend it for business users, the C7 would make a very capable everyday phone for many people.
Specs:
Form factor Candybar
LCD size and classification 3.5-inch OLED
Physical Dimension 117.3 x 56.8 x 10.5 mm
Weight 130g
Band Quadband
Internal memory 350MB; expandable microSD