Nokia's C3-01 Touch & Type has a clumsy name, but it's a darn useful cell phone. It's a standard candy bar style handset with a numeric keypad, except that it also has a large (for its size) touch screen. At just $179—inexpensive for an unlocked device—the Nokia C3-01 offers plenty of power for world travelers, or anyone who wants a svelte device that works with AT&T, T-Mobile, or prepaid SIM cards. That makes it our new Editors' Choice for unlocked cell phones.
Design and Call Quality
The Nokia C3-01 Touch & Type looks and feels classy. It measures 4.4 by 1.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.5 ounces. The aluminum housing and tapered battery cover make the C3-01 comfortable to hold for long periods. My test model was silver; a charcoal gray version is also available. The 2.4-inch, plastic resistive touch screen sports 240-by-320-pixel resolution. Unlike the larger Nokia C6 ($249, 2.5 stars), the C3's screen was accurate and responsive to my touches. The numeric keypad features large but heavily recessed keys. Dialing numbers felt a bit stiff, but I got used to it quickly.
The Nokia C3-01 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and quad-band HSDPA 10.2 (850/900/1900/2100) device with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. That makes it perfect for overseas travel, as the C3-01 can hit high-speed data networks both here and in many other countries. I tested the C3 with an AT&T SIM; a T-Mobile SIM will work fine, but you'll be limited to 2G speeds in the U.S.
Call quality was okay, but not great in my tests. Callers said my voice sounded about average through the C3-01's tiny microphone. On my side of the call, voices sounded muffled and distant, and there wasn't enough gain for noisier offices even with the volume maxed out. Reception was average. Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. There's no voice dialing of any kind, Bluetooth or otherwise. The speakerphone sounded clear and full, although it didn't go quite as loud as I would have liked. Battery life was average at 4 hours and 41 minutes of talk time.
Operating System and Apps
The Series 40 6th Edition OS is easy enough to get around, and isn't the complex nightmare that Series 60 has become over the years. The well-calibrated touch screen only helps matters. Nokia doesn't publish a CPU spec for the C3-01, but the phone feels much more responsive than the admittedly more ambitious Nokia C6 does.
Otherwise, you get a fairly standard software complement for a Series 40 phone. Nokia's WebKit browser is a newer addition, and it's pretty usable, but the low screen resolution and small size mean that you're better off sticking with WAP pages. There are built-in Nokia Messaging e-mail, IM, and threaded SMS apps. All are reasonably powerful, but considering the phone's numeric keypad, the "Type" portion of the C3-01's name is a bit of a stretch. Get something with a QWERTY keyboard or larger touch screen if you plan on handling a lot of e-mail. There's also no GPS, so keep that in mind.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The standard-size 3.5-mm headphone jack is welcome. Nokia buried the microSD card slot underneath the battery cover, but accessing it was easy enough; my 32GB SanDisk card worked fine. There is only 23MB of free internal memory. Music tracks sounded clear and full over Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones ($129, 3.5 stars). The music player was fun to use and displays large album art thumbnails. There's also an FM radio. There are no options to buy music over the air, but that's not a huge loss. Standalone videos played smoothly in full-screen mode and looked sharp, although the 2.4-inch LCD is a limiting factor for video playback.
The 5-megapixel camera comes with an LED flash, though it lacks auto-focus. Test photos looked very good: sharp, natural, and well lit both indoors and out. Shutter speeds were fast, and it was easy to navigate the camera's various settings. Nokia includes image rotation, color, and contrast controls for some basic on-device photo editing. Recorded 640-by-480-pixel videos were a little jerky at 15 frames per second, but they were usable.
All told, the Nokia C3-01 Touch & Type is a great second phone for use overseas, or for anyone that doesn't like being tied to a contract here in the U.S. The Sony Ericsson Naite ($149, 4 stars) is still a fine choice, and it's $30 cheaper. But you lose the touch screen and standard-size headphone jack, and the Naite doesn't have nearly as good a camera as the Nokia C3-01. If you want a QWERTY keyboard, the Nokia E5 ($229, 3 stars) offers a pretty comfortable one, plus GPS, and its Series 60 OS makes it a real smartphone that runs thousands of third-party apps. It also lacks a touch screen, though, and it's made of plastic instead of aluminum. Worse, the OS is a lot more complicated; existing Symbian fans will take to the E5, but everyone else will have an easier time with the C3-01.
