High end or low end, or somewhere in between; Windows Phones all share the same basic specs thanks to Microsoft’s strict guidelines. That means this $49 phone runs on the same CPU and its display has the same resolution as the higher end Lumia 800 and AT&T Windows Phones like the HTC Titan. You get a second generation single core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with Adreno 205 graphics, a 3.7″ 800 x 480 pixel capacitive touch screen, 3G and 4G HSPA+ 14.4Mbps (currently the fastest data connection Windows Phone supports), a 5 megapixel rear camera and the usual WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and a GPS. Not bad for the price!

Thanks to the 1.4GHz CPU, the Lumia 710 hums right along. Windows Phone is optimized for the Qualcomm Snapdragon single core CPU, and speed is always impressive. It’s as fast as the iPhone 4S and you don’t see the occasional lag that pesters Android phones. XBOX Live games play fluently on the phone, and even demanding 3D titles play well. Speaking of XBOX, Windows Phone integrates with XBOX Live and there’s a healthy selection of quality games ranging in price from .99 to $6.99, with most high quality titles selling for $2.99 to $4.99.

Typical of lower priced Windows Phones, you get less storage: 8 gigs vs. 16 gigs on higher end phones. The Lumia 710 has about 5.33 gigs free for your use, and that might be a bit tight for those of you who embrace the Zune ecosystem for syncing music and video. Zune is as ever one of the slickest and most enjoyable mobile music players, and it makes the iPhone’s music player look a bit old school. It has album art, and side-scrolling to see related music, artist bios and more.

If you have a Zune pass ($10/month), you’ve got an all you can eat subscription music service and you can stream music to the phone without side-loading using the Zune app in Windows or the Mac Windows Phone Connector (with iTunes sync) in Mac OS X. If you wish to purchase music and videos from the Zune Marketplace, you’ll pay using the Microsoft Points system, just as you do with XBOX downloadable content. The Lumia 710 has good sound quality from the speaker, and very good sound quality through headphones and Bluetooth stereo headphones. The rear-firing speaker is surprisingly loud for a small phone.

Again, thanks to Microsoft’s broad ecosystem, you get very good MS Exchange support and a mobile MS Office suite for viewing and editing MS Office files. In addition it handles Gmail and Google Contacts and Calendar sync along with POP3 and IMAP email. The phone can pull documents and photos from the SkyDrive cloud too. The Lumia 710 has 4G HSPA+ on T-Mobile, and speeds in our solid coverage area were very good, with documents transferring quickly and music streaming without a hiccup. T-Mobile TV streamed perfectly over HSPA+, as did Netflix. When streaming lots of video or music, you might want to use WiFi when available to avoid hitting your data cap. T-Mobile doesn’t cut off customers who exceed their data plan allowance, but they will slow down your connection to EDGE speeds for the remainder of your monthly period.

Nokia Lumia 710 Video Review

The Nokia Lumia 710 looks distinctly Nokia. It has that bar design with curved corners, complex curves and a general Euro chic style that sets it apart from other Windows Phones. It’s available in white and black, and though it doesn’t look as wildly unique as the unibody polycarbonate Nokia Lumia 800, it’s not a cheap looking phone, nor dull. It’s not terribly thin though; at 0.49″, it’s semi-chunky by today’s super-thin phone standards. The thickness does afford a removable back cover with access to the 1300 mAh Lithium Ion battery inside, which the slimmer Lumia 800 lacks. The back is made of a rubbery soft touch material and it seems fairly rugged and shock absorbing too. The front and top and bottom edges are glossy plastic, and the 3 standard Windows Phone buttons are the mechanical clicky type rather than capacitive. They score for tactile feedback, but are annoyingly stiff to press.

The “ClearBlack” TFT LCD is very sharp and has good color in terms of saturation and accuracy. Blacks are indeed deep, viewing angles are decent but not 178 degree IPS wide, and brightness is decent though it does fade in bright outdoor light. The display is clad in Corning Gorilla Glass for added durability and scratch resistance.

As you’d expect from Nokia, call quality is excellent for both incoming and outgoing voice. Reception is solid and we didn’t have a signal call drop. The phone uses a micro SIM just like the Lumia 800 and iPhone 4/4S. The smartphone is quad band GSM and quad band HSPA+. It has both T-Mobile and AT&T HSPA+ bands, likely due to the planned (but failed) merger with AT&T. The Lumia 710 works with Bluetooth headsets, car kits and Bluetooth stereo gear. Audio quality over Bluetooth is particularly good both for music and voice. Alas, the phone has neither a mobile hotspot feature nor WiFi calling.

The 5 megapixel rear camera takes very good photos that are sharp, colorful and well-exposed. Nokia knows how to make a good camera. The phone can shoot 720p video that likewise looks good, but there’s no 1080p video recording here due to the single core CPU. The camera has an LED flash and Windows Phone offers a healthy selection of settings and the ability to upload photos and videos to Sky Drive and social networking sites.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to like in Nokia’s first US Windows Phone. The bargain price belies a solid set of features; quick performance and an elegant though not thin design. Call quality is excellent, the camera takes good photos and the phone is fast. Gaming is fluid and fun, the Zune music experience is as ever enjoyable and streaming video plays well over T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. If you’re looking for an easy to pocket smartphone that’s wallet-friendly, the Nokia Lumia 710 is worth a look. It beats the HTC Radar 4G Windows Phone on T-Mobile for both price and specs, and it’s a lovely introduction to Windows Phone. We do wish the front buttons weren’t so maddeningly difficult to press and that the Lumia 710 had the mobile hotspot feature, but those are our only two complaints.

Price: $49.99 with a 2 year contract

Source

Nokia smartphone veterans, and there are millions of you across the world since Nokia is still the highest volume handset maker on the planet, will find the learning curve is quite small. If you’ve used an S60 5th Edition phone, you’ll be familiar with the widgets, shortcut bar at the bottom of the home screen and top area where you can manage wireless connections. Nokia owners who haven’t used a touch screen Nokia will still feel at home with familiar icons, the usual deep profile functionality and a shared logic with S60 overall. N900 users will recognize the multi-page home screen, each with its own wallpaper, and the simplified menu structures. While S60 was mired in menus that were byzantine and unintuitive until you became an old hand at things (even then, it could be hard to remember where a particular setting was buried), menus on the N8 are simple and things are where you’d expect them to be. Like BlackBerry OS 6, the menu functionality is deeper than on the iPhone, so it’s a bit less simple in that respect, but it’s nonetheless easy to operate and powerful.

The N8 is a phone with excellent specs, and the most impressive are the 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and pentaband 3G HSDPA. That means this unlocked Nokia with work on both AT&T and T-Mobile’s 3G networks here in the US and it will work abroad. That’s what we call a flexible unlocked phone, and that’s important since you can use the N8 with any GSM carrier’s SIM card. The N8 has a 3.5″, 360 x 640 display with an accelerometer and ambient light sensor, a 680MHz CPU, 16 gigs of storage, a microSD card slot, WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI out, a front-facing video conferencing camera and a GPS that works with the free Ovi Maps and navigation.

The N8′s casing is made of aluminum and it feels solid and sturdy. The end cap areas are hearty plastic, likely a good idea since the phone’s various antennas live under these areas. Nokia offers the phone in a selection of bright colors, though at launch we only get black (more like dark gray) in the US.

Camera

As a camera phone, the Nokia N8 is simply the best on the market. Nokia has been a leader in high end phone photography, starting with the iconic Nokia N95 and its then ground-breaking 5 megapixel autofocus camera. The N8′s 12 megapixel sensor is tops by phone standards and it easily competes with my not too shabby 12 megapixel Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 point and shoot camera. I doubt the N8′s sensor is as large as the Lumix, and it’s only a fraction of the size of a dSLR’s, but it takes natural yet sharp shots that are nearly as good as the Lumix. The lens is made by Carl Zeiss, as we’ve come to expect from high end Nokia camera phones, and it has a wide angle 28mm view and a fast f2.8 max aperture. We’re thrilled that Nokia went with a Xenon flash, and a large one at that. Though the flash is long and narrow which should help light spread, it illuminates the center of the frame rather than filling the shot with light.

Outdoor photos are crisp but not oversharpened, have very good color balance and saturation and relatively little noise. These are good enough to print up to 5 x 7 or perhaps 8 x10. Whiteout is well controlled for a camera in the point and shoot class (see the sample photo of the gnome and the sunny ground patch behind the Celosia flower). When shooting video outdoors in bright light, the camera takes between 2 and 5 seconds to adjust to high contrast lighting, and it does admirably once adjusted. The camera shoots video in 720p (1280 x 720) at 25fps (more like 24.6) in MPEG4 format. Video quality is again tops and to our eye looks better than the very good iPhone 4. The camera has stabilization for video and a wealth of settings, though the camera interface isn’t a paragon of simplicity. But you’ll figure things out quickly enough, and it’s worth the effort given the quality photos and video this camera phone produces. Shot times are quick by camera phone standards when saving to internal storage (with 16 gigs, you can snap hundreds of shots and a good bit of video footage).

There’s a front-facing VGA camera for video conferencing, and you can download apps like Fring to do VoIP and video calls.

Video Review

Here’s our 16 minute video review of the Nokia N8. We cover the PIM applications, home screens, hardware design, Symbian ^3 look and feel and lots more.

Phone and Data

We’ve come to expect excellent voice quality and reception from Nokia and the N8 delivers superb voice quality on both incoming and outgoing ends. 3G reception is just average rather than stellar, but we’ll cut Nokia some slack since they managed to get 5 bands of 3G, a very rare feat, in the N8. We tested the phone with both an AT&T and T-Mobile US SIM card and got 3.5G connections and speeds up to 2100kbps down on those carriers’ HSDPA networks. The phone supports HSDPA up to 10.2Mbps and of course it can do UMTS and EDGE.

The Nokia has an excellent speaker for both multimedia and voice calls. The microphone’s range isn’t that large and we found we had to stay within a foot or two of the phone when making calls. The N8 worked well with a variety of Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth stereo headphones and the car kit we tested. For you retro wired types, there’s a stereo earbud headset in the box.

While data speeds, as measured using DSL Reports’ mobile speed tests, were quite good, the browser was the surprising weak link in all things online. Nokia once had one of the best browsers in the business, but we found the N8′s full HTML browser with Flash support to be a bit sluggish and balky on full HTML desktop sites. Pages rendered perfectly but the browser often paused a few times during page download and rendering, even pages without Flash. Scrolling is smooth and multi-touch was a big laggy at times compared to the iPhone and recent Android phones. We were able to play Flash videos embedded in web pages (watch our video review to see Flash in action), but it sometimes took quite a long time for these pages to load and even more time to get the player going.

At other times, Flash pages downloaded fairly quickly and the video started in under 5 seconds. We suspect that future firmware updates will improve the browser and Flash performance. The browser’s user interface is similar to the Nokia N97 and N97 mini: once the page renders an arrow on the bottom right corner brings up a palette of controls and you can quickly bookmark sites. You can set your preferred search engine (Google or Bing), and when you tap the enter URL function, a second box appears for searches.

The phone comes with very basic Twitter and Facebook apps/widgets, no IM clients and an email client that works with POP3/IMAP and MS Exchange email. The email client isn’t sexy but it worked reliably with our IMAP and Gmail accounts and had solid Exchange support. The phone can sync to Ovi for contacts as well as MS Exchange but there’s no built-in Google sync. The contacts and calendar applications on the phone are a distinct improvement over older S60 versions with a more modern UI (again, check out our video review).

Performance

the N8 runs on a single core ARM11 CPU clocked at 680MHz. That’s a bit slower in terms of clock speed than the top Android phones, but Nokia’s OS and software tend to be very lightweight. The phone has 256 megs of RAM (again, that’s at the low end of the smartphone scale) and 16 gigs of flash storage. There’s a microSD card slot on the phone’s side next to the SIM card slot where you can expand storage.

Overall, the N8′s speed was acceptable and sometimes fast. But the phone lagged here and there for a second, making us think again of future firmware updates that might improve performance. This is not a slow phone, but it’s not lightning-fast like the new T-Mobile G2 Android OS 2.2 smartphone. Even with 5-7 heavy programs running in the background, the phone kept up nicely and we didn’t get any out of memory error messages. You can press and hold the application key below the display to bring up a list of running programs.

Multimedia

The photo viewer is attractive and fast. It starts with a screen full of thumbnails and you can tap on any photo or video to view it. The app responds quickly to the accelerometer and resizing images is quick. The video player handles MPEG4, Flash, WMV9 and RealVideo formats. The player performed solidly with our test MPEG4 H.264 videos encoded at VGA resolution up to 2mbps bitrates. The widescreen display is particularly well-suited to movie playback and viewing angles and brightness are excellent. Since this is an AMOLED display, colors are very saturated, making photos and video look even better.

The music player has a pleasant interface and it supports a variety of popular formats including AAC and MP3. Nokia has their own Ovi Music Store with many millions of tracks, and you can load your own music using drag and drop via Mass Storage mode, or via desktop sync on Mac and Windows. Sound quality is quite good via a good set of headphones and the speaker is notably better than average. You can stream tunes to your car radio using the phone’s FM transmitter, and there’s an FM radio as well with RDS and station detection.

GPS and Ovi Maps

The Nokia has a built-in GPS and it comes with Ovi Maps, a free mapping and navigation service that downloads map data, POIs and directions over the data connection. Ovi Maps’ interface has improved, and it’s somewhat less arcane to use, and US directions are less bizarre but still not quite all there yet. Example: I had the phone map a simple 1 mile trip home in a town that’s laid on a logical grid with 2-way streets, and it told me to go 1.2 miles out of my way, crossing over a highway and taking a street that was a half mile east of my starting point and destination. Trust me, this was neither the shortest nor quickest route in my straight line due north trip. The GPS is not locked to Ovi Maps, so you can try out other solutions when they’re available via the Ovi Store or direct retail.

Battery Life

The Nokia N8 is the only Nokia I can recall that doesn’t have a user replaceable battery. Nokia states that it can easily be replaced at a service center, and I suspect one must remove two tiny Allen head screws to open up the battery compartment. The phone has exceptional battery life by high end smartphone standards, and with 3G active, 2 social networking widgets updating throughout the day, email running and WiFi left on, the phone lasted through 2 days of fairly heavy use. We’re impressed that Nokia managed such impressive battery life with a 1200 mAh Lithium Ion battery. The N8 can charge over USB or you can use the included charger with the newer Nokia tiny barrel style connector to charge the phone. When the phone is idle, it displays a large analog clock with the date by default. As with most Nokia phones, it can flash its LED to notify you of missed calls etc., and it has that spooky-sounding breathing option where it lets you know it’s alive.

The Nokia N8 vs. the Competition, Conclusion

Thanks to the iPhone raising the bar for touch screen smartphones several years ago, the Nokia N8 faces some stiff competition. If you’re currently a Nokia person, you’ll likely enjoy the N8. It’s a solid high-end Nokia with great voice, a fantastic camera and a vivid AMOLED capacitive display. And the new Symbian ^3 OS will seem like a godsend too. But if you’re not a Nokia person (this includes most Americans), Symbian ^3 won’t offer anything that might tear you away from iOS or Android. It’s less evolved and less sophisticated in terms of UI, and it lacks the fun-factor that makes you want to keep playing with the phone. It’s competent and quite usable, but it’s not alluring. That said, if you’re a shutterbug and are looking for the best camera you can find in a phone, you might decide you’ll adapt to Symbian. Likewise, if you need a flexible unlocked GSM phone, it doesn’t get better than the pentaband N8.

The Ovi Store has a large selection of applications, but nothing that can compare to iTunes or even Android just yet for Symbian ^3-optimized selection. However, with a few million downloads per day and a huge Nokia worldwide community, we’re sure to see a lot more Symbian ^3 apps in the Ovi Store. There are several good IM clients, popular games (Angry Birds, anyone?) and plenty of news and weather apps.

The Nokia N8 and Symbian ^3 are a good start for Nokia as it seeks to compete with iOS, Android and even BlackBerry OS6. While the software isn’t ground-breaking, it’s well optimized for touch and familiar to the large installed base of Nokia users. The hardware is top notch, and the phone has excellent build quality and all the specs you’d expect from a flagship smartphone.

Specs:

• Display: 3.5″ multi-touch capacitive AMOLED display. Screen size diagonally: 3.5″. Resolution: 360 x 640, supports both portrait and landscape modes via accelerometer. Has proximity and ambient light sensors.
• Battery: Lithium Ion rechargeable. Battery is not user replaceable. 1200 mAh.
• Performance: 680MHz ARM11 single core processor. 256 megs RAM. 16 gigs flash storage memory.
• Size: 4.47 x 2.78 x 0.53 inches. Weight: 4.67 ounces.
• Phone: Quad band unlocked GSM world phone with GSM/GPRS/EDGE on the 850/900/1800/1900MHz bands. WCDMA/HSDPA/HSUPA on the 850/900/1700/1900/2100MHz bands (works with AT&T, T-Mobile and overseas carriers). HSDPA Cat9 10.2Mbps.
• Camera: Main (rear) camera: 12 MP with Carl Zeiss autofocus lens and Xenon flash. Focal length: 28mm, f2.8. Max photo resolution 4000 x3000 pixels, JPEG format with Exif data and optional location data. Video resolution is 720p (1280 x 720) at 25fps in MPEG4 H.264 format. Has 3x digital zoom for video and 2x digital zoom for photos. Secondary (front) camera: VGA 640 x 480 resolution).
• AV: Built in speaker, mic and 3.5mm standard stereo headphone jack. Has micro HDMI port (cable included). FM radio and FM transmitter are on board. Has music, sound recorded and video players. Supported video playback formats: Flash, RealVideo 10, Sorenson Spark, WMV9, 3GPP, MPEG4 H.263 and H.264. Music formats: MP3, AAC, AC-3, eAAC, AAC+, eAAC+, EFR and WMA.
• Networking: Integrated WiFi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 supporting the following profiles: A2DP, AVRCP, BIP, DUN, FTP, GAP, GAVDP, GOEP, HFP, HSP, OPP, PBAP, SAP, SPP.
• Software: Symbian OS ^3. Full HTML 4.1 web browser with support for WAP, Flash Lite 4.0, Flash video and XHTML. Email client (POP3/IMAP/MS Exchange, Contacts, Calendar, Notes, file manager, dictionary, Zip utility, Adobe PDF viewer, voice recorder, Message Reader, QuickOffice viewer (compatible with MS Office 2007 and earlier), Ovi Maps, Ovi Store, music player, video player, photo viewer, Ovi Music, Settings and setup wizards, software update utility, FM transmitter, FM Radio, Ovi Sync, clock, camera, YouTube player, social networking (Facebook and Twitter) and on-phone user guide.
• Expansion: 1 SDHC microSD card slot. Supports USB OTG, mass storage mode and MTP for card and internal memory. No card included.

Hardware

The E7 may be the largest of the recent Symbian smartphones – looking at first glance like an oversized N8 and significantly chunkier than the svelte C7 – but inside it’s business as usual. Keeping Symbian moving is a 680MHz ARM 11 processor, paired with 256MB of RAM and OpenGL 2.0 graphics support. Connectivity follows Nokia’s throw-in-the-lot pattern of recent devices, with pentaband UMTS/WCDMA (supporting Euro, T-Mobile USA and AT&T 3G bands in a single device), WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS/A-GPS and an FM radio. Accelerometers, a digital compass, proximity and ambient light sensors, and a front-facing camera for 3G video calls round things out.

The E7 may measure 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm but there’s still been some compromise in terms of fitting everything in. Gone is the N8′s FM transmitter and microSD card slot, leaving only the 16GB of fixed storage, and there’s no 2mm charging port either. Instead, you get a microUSB port and mini HDMI output, and Nokia bundles both an HDMI adapter (to get a full-sized port) and a USB Host adapter (to plug in a keyboard, mouse, or USB drive) in the retail box.

The camera also gets a downgrade in comparison to the N8, a mere 8-megapixels versus the photo flagship’s 12-megapixels, and using EDoF (Extended Depth of Field) rather than active auto-focus. It also has a dual-LED flash rather than Xenon. Still, the smaller camera module does allow Nokia to do away with the N8′s unsightly hump.

Controls are limited to a power/profile button on the top edge (in-between the HDMI and 3.5mm headphones ports), a volume rocker and camera shortcut on the right edge, and a lock switch on the left edge. All are beautifully bevelled, the silver aluminum glinting against the matte black finish. A backlit home/menu button sits underneath the 4-inch capacitive touchscreen. That display runs at an underwhelming 640 x 360 resolution – given the size, the pixels are clearly discernible – but the quality of the 16m color AMOLED panel, using Nokia’s Clear Black branded technology, is almost enough to make us forgive the pixel shortage. Colors are rich, blacks inky and the E7 holds its own on all but resolution when put next to a Samsung Super AMOLED screen.

You honestly have to search hard to find a hardware point on which to criticise Nokia. The Finnish company has built a reputation for rock-solid phones – at the budget end and at the premium end – and the E7 is no different. Our only complaint is a slightly rattly lock switch, and when that’s the sum flaws of a handset then the company is obviously getting something right. Of course, we knew that from the N8; what the E7 introduces is a brilliant QWERTY keyboard as well.

We had high hopes for the E7′s ‘board after Nokia World 2010, even having only played with the prototypes the company brought to the show, and the production models don’t disappoint. A nudge at the left edge pops the spring-loaded display open with a pleasing thunk, tilted at a useful angle. The keys themselves consist of four rows of slightly domed, hard backlit buttons, with a broad spacebar and dedicated @ and arrows. Numbers share the top row of letters, triggered with the function key.

The whole thing is perfect for holding two-handed and thumbing out emails and texts. The buttons have just the right amount of resistance and travel – far better than the membrane panels we’ve seen on, say, recent Motorola Android phones – and you can even put the E7 flat on a table and use four fingers for speedier typing. Nokia bills the E7 as the new Communicator, and fans of those business-phones’ full keyboards won’t be disappointed.

Software

The E7 runs Symbian^3, the same PR1.1 release as just made public for the N8, though of course renamed PR1.0 for the newer device. That makes it instantly familiar to existing users, but also means it faces the same uphill struggle to convince would-be buyers that Symbian remains competitive in the face of Android, iOS and other platforms.

It can be easy to overlook Symbian’s strengths. The 680MHz processor may be old tech in comparison to the newest 1GHz single- and dual-core chips we’ve seen on recent Android devices, but it’s certainly sufficient to keep the E7 moving along swiftly. The only real sluggishness we’ve noticed has been in the native Symbian browser, where complex webpages could be slow to render or navigate around. The flip side, of course, is that a low-power CPU means less battery consumption, something we’ll touch on later.

As on the N7, C7 and C6-01, the E7 has the same three-pane homescreen, each with room for up to six widget blocks. Options include email (with the two newest messages from the inbox shown), calendar, speed-dials, sets of four app shortcuts, media controls and entertainment news from Paramount and others. Alternatively there are more on offer to download in Nokia’s Ovi Store. Bizarrely, Nokia continues to insist on introducing artificial lag in swiping between the three panes, something which belies the capacitive touchscreen’s actually responsive performance.

Beyond that it’s generally Symbian as standard. Preloaded is the Ovi Store, Nokia’s photo and video editing apps, QuickOffice and Ovi Maps, among others. Ovi Maps in particular has evolved into a capable Google Maps alternative, complete with turn by turn directions, offline mapping data support and various third-party POI, recommendation and review services. There’s also rudimentary social networking integration, capable of pulling in Facebook and Twitter updates and pushing them to a homescreen widget, though nothing as comprehensive as we’ve seen on Android. Nokia’s sharing functionality falls well short as well; perhaps we’ve been spoiled by Android’s all-inclusive Share feature, which offers both the platform’s homegrown apps and any compatible third-party methods as well, but Nokia’s standard options – by email, message or Bluetooth, or on Facebook or Twitter – fail to open up to other apps you might download from the Ovi Store.

Symbian’s perhaps tired UI will be refreshed in a software update expected later this year, and that really can’t come too soon. Little things, like the absence of a QWERTY keyboard in portrait orientation – instead you get a T9-style numeric keypad with numbers – jar the user experience somewhat, though at least the E7 has its physical ‘board to salve the pain. Filling in text boxes using the on-screen keyboard (both portrait and landscape) still insists on calling up a separate dialog pane, though thankfully the same isn’t true when you’re using the hardware keyboard.

Nokia’s native browser is also due for an overhaul, useful since right now it’s outclassed by rival devices. There’s Flash Lite 4 support (for most Flash Player 10.1 content), which is welcome, but there’s no text-reflowing on zoom which makes for plenty of pinch-zooming or panning if you want to read blocks of text. The relatively low screen resolution also makes its presence known; where on rival devices with similar-sized displays you can often read text at low levels of zoom, the E7′s 640 x 360 simply lacks the pixels for that degree of crispness.

The Ovi Store offers some salvation, with the popular Opera Mobile Browser being one of the most downloaded titles (and offering a far better online experience). There are also mainstream titles like Skype – which works very well for voice and IM chat – and popular Twitter app Gravity (which we still say Nokia should buy and install as standard). Unfortunately, there are also plenty of gaps where rival platforms iOS and Android have big name apps; it’s worth exploring the Ovi.com site to see if anything you particularly rely on is available on Symbian yet.

For enterprise, out of the box there’s support for multiple email accounts – with presets for Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Ovi Mail, Hotmail, and various ISP accounts – together with threaded SMS and MMS conversations. There’s also a Message Reader app, which will do text-to-speech from your inbox. With the right capacitive stylus (not included) you can also use handwriting recognition, though we don’t imagine many will opt for that over the physical keyboard. Finally, there’s VPN support for those needing to access private networks, and a SIP client that tightly integrates VoIP services into the native contacts app.

Camera

Nokia has built a reputation for high-quality cameras on its mobile devices, and the E7 follows some way in that tradition. As we said, the limitations of space mean the 8-megapixels have to make do with EDoF rather than true auto-focus, and a dual-LED flash rather than Xenon. Still, it does mean you can use the LEDs as a video light, and the E7 will shoot 720p HD clips at 25fps that can then be easily played back via the HDMI port. A second, VGA-resolution camera on the front is intended for video calls, but can also be used to shoot grainy stills.

The end result is similar to what we saw on the C7: decent general scenes, but a real struggle with macro and close-up shots. The EDoF system simply can’t handle getting up too close. Otherwise it’s a good showing, with accurate colors and crisp edges. The speed between shots is also impressively fast.

Video, meanwhile, only really smears during the fastest pans, and the quality is solid for 720p HD on a cellphone. Detail can be prone to blurring at times, however.

Phone and Battery

On another device we’d save some serious words of criticism for a sealed-in battery, but the E7′s frugal CPU actually leaves the smartphone capable of a couple of days’ use from a single charge. Impressive stuff, given the size of the display and the fact that we had Gmail regularly checking throughout. On the flip side, we didn’t reach for the E7 to generally play with apps and the internet as much as we find ourselves doing with, say, an Android device, so that somewhat reduced use needs to be accounted for too.

Phone performance is solid, as we’ve come to expect from Nokia, though the absence of the camera hump meant that the speakerphone sounded a little more muted than on the N8. It’s possible to set the E7 to automatically kick into speakerphone mode when the display-slide is opened.

Wrap-Up

There are several reasons for which we want to love the Nokia E7. The physical design is cleaner than the N8, build quality puts rival handsets from Samsung and LG to shame, the physical keyboard could give RIM nightmares and, mediocre display resolution aside, Nokia’s hardware spec sheet is bulging with everything the smartphone needs to be taken seriously. Even the relatively underpowered CPU makes sense when you look at battery life and the moderate demands Symbian makes of it.

Unfortunately, as with the N8 and C7, solid, beautiful hardware isn’t sufficient in today’s smartphone market. Symbian remains the sticking point for us and for many users; serviceable, but lacking the flare, ambition and ease of use of rival platforms. Yes, it can be coaxed into doing much of what the majority of us expect from a high-end device, but it feels workmanlike where now we expect magical.

If the Nokia E7 was running Android, or Windows Phone 7, it would undoubtedly be a best-seller. Nokia’s quality design and construction are rightly admired, and for text entry the E7′s physical keyboard is superb. Where the original Nokia Communicators drove innovation in the mobile segment, however, blurring the lines between phone and computer, the E7 falls short. Symbian fans will love it, but the E7 won’t open up the market any more than the N8 and C7 before it.

Hardware

The hardware remains the same as the C7: solid construction with nice materials and a good fit and finish. T-Mobile offers the Astound in a white and silver color scheme as opposed to the other options that are available worldwide. Some might not be fans of the color, but we found it to be an attractive device nonetheless. The chrome bezel that surrounds the screen is reminiscent of the iPhone 3G and 3GS design, and we suspect that it will get quite beat up looking after some months of wear and tear.

The screen is the same 3.5-inch capacitive AMOLED unit with nHD (640 x 360 pixel) resolution as found on the C7. Colors are bright and the resolution is sharp enough as long as you are not looking too closely at it. Viewing angles are very good as well. The only issue we had with the screen was its performance in direct sunlight, where it can become very washed out and difficult to read.

The Astound also maintains the 8 megapixel rear camera and 1.3 megapixel front camera of the C7. The rear camera still does not have autofocus, which we find to be a huge detriment. The extended depth of field lens can take acceptable pictures outdoors, however indoor subjects can prove troublesome. The dual-LED flash had a tendency to blow out the images harshly, not to mention that anything within a couple feet of the lens would be severely out of focus. Face-tracking is included and works as expected, maintaining a lock on our subjects faces quickly and accurately. The rear camera is also capable of recording 720p (1280 x 720 pixel) video at 25 frames per second. The quality of the video was ok, but the 25 fps frame rate will hold back capturing fast action. As far as the 1.3 megapixel front camera goes, the quality was not great and Nokia and T-Mobile did not package any software with the Astound to use the camera for video calling. At this point, it seems like it is a very “me-too” feature.

Call Quality

Call quality was very good with the Astound. Callers were able to hear us loud and clear and we could likewise understand them just as easily. T-Mobile has added its Wi-Fi Calling functionality to the Astound, which allows users to connect to their personal Wi-Fi network and use that to route calls over the internet as opposed to using a cellular signal. It is not a separate VoIP service, though, as your plans minutes will still be used while utilizing Wi-Fi Calling. Using the Wi-Fi Calling feature was seamless once we connected the phone to our Wi-Fi network and enable the option. Call quality was not noticeably different than when using the 3G network, but we imagine that it will be a very useful function for those whose homes or offices do not have a strong T-Mobile signal.

Usability

One of the features that T-Mobile has added to the C7 is the portrait QWERTY on-screen keyboard. Users have been requesting this feature on the C7 since it was released, since it is generally expected to be available on modern smartphones. However, we found the keyboard to be very difficult to type on when compared to competitors such as Android and iOS. The keys are very narrow and small and prove to be difficult targets to tap. Haptic feedback is enabled by default, which is nice to have, but we found the keyboard to be more frustrating than anything and ended up switching to the T9 layout at times. If you turn the phone into landscape mode, the full keyboard becomes Swype enabled so typing in that orientation can be easier. Swype worked as expected, tracing ones finger across the keyboard to type produced generally accurate results.

T-Mobile has also tweaked the browser on the Astound for better performance when compared with the C7. However, we still found it to be lagging behind in operation when compared with other platforms such as Android and iOS. Mobile pages loaded up quickly, but as soon as we enabled desktop view on sites, things started to slow down and become frustrating. Panning is very choppy and difficult, and while pinch-to-zoom is enabled in the browser, its is very stuttered and hard to use. The web browser is one of the most used features on smartphones today, and unfortunately the browser that ships with Symbian^3 is very difficult to use.

Symbian^3′s shortcomings showed themselves at numerous other times while using the Astound, as well. When trying to set up an Exchange email account, we repeatedly got errors relating to the password entry, even though the password was confirmed to be correct. In order to get the phone to synchronize our contacts and calendar with the Exchange account, we had to add those options after setting up the account to only sync email. Setting up a standard IMAP account, such as Gmail, went more smoothly.

We were also frustrated with the lack of consistency throughout the OS, something we have mentioned time and again with Symbian. Some actions require a long press on the screen, some require jumping into an options menu, while others still require diving through long trees of menus. It is not obvious when each option is required to accomplish the intended action, so your best bet is just guessing until you find what you are looking for.

Reviewer Spin

In conclusion, while there are certain things we do like about the Astound, it is a difficult phone to recommend in today’s market. The build quality is excellent, the design is attractive, the size is just about right, call quality is great, and battery life is very good. Unfortunately, that’s where the good things end. The Symbian^3 operating system is just so far behind in offering competitive features and operations that, even with T-Mobile’s attempted enhancements, we cannot recommend it over other options. The Astound is priced at an attractive $79.99 on contract, however it does require a monthly data plan. Right now, the LG Optimus T with Android 2.2 Froyo is only $39.99 from T-Mobile and offers a much better experience with a faster, more modern OS and an arguably better camera. If Nokia had put an autofocus camera on the Astound, we could at least recommend it for those looking for an inexpensive phone with a high-quality camera. As it stands right now, the Astound is only going to appeal to the Symbian faithful.

Box Contents:

* Nokia X5-01
* Nokia BL-5F 950 mAh Li-Ion battery
* Nokia Travel Charger AC-6N
* Nokia 2 GB microSD card MU-37
* Nokia Connectivity Cable CA-101D
* Nokia Headset WH-102
* User Guide

Design:

The Nokia X5-01 features an unique squarish design. This handset also comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The slide mechanism on this handset is quite smooth as compared to the other slider phones in the same price range. The front side of this handset is made up of plastic, while the sides and back of this handset is made up of stainless steel.

On the front side, you will find a 2.3 inch TFT screen. This handset has a sharper display under normal lighting conditions, but it becomes almost unreadable in direct sunlight. Below the display, there are three keys on the left side, as well as three keys on the right side. A 5-ways navigation key is also placed below the display. Along with the usual left/right selection key and the call/end key, you will find an additional home key on the left and the music key on the right. The keys on the front were not comfortable, since when I tried pressing the right selection key, the music key was pressed accidentally. The same problem was faced while I tried to use the left selection key.

On the top of this device, you will find a 3.5mm headset jack and a Micro USB/charger connecter. The loudspeaker is situated at the bottom of this device. Even though, Nokia X5-01 has 3G capabilities, a front-facing camera was missing in this device. It means that, you cannot video call with your friends using this device.

This handset has a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and battery with metallic casing on its back. On the right side of this device, you will find the volume keys, while on the left side, there are no keys at all. Even though, this handset has a 5 megapixel camera, a much needed camera button was missing on this device.

User Interface, OS and more:

Nokia X5-01 runs on the Symbian S60v3 operating system. I’m already familiar with this OS, since I have already used the S60v3 based device for more than 3 years, so using this handset was not a problem. Even if you are new to this OS, it won’t take more than a day to get the things right.

On the home screen, you can directly add your favourite contacts as well as shortcut for most used applications. If you don’t like the current layout of your home screen, then you can easily change it from 5 different standby layout, available under themes. It also has 4 different customizable menu – Grid, List, Horseshoe and V-shaped. Out of these, I personally liked the Grid and V-shaped menu.

This handset has Push Mail, SNS app as well as chat client support out of the box. The native email client currently supports Ovi Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail and other email services. The chat client supports Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Ovi Chat and Yahoo Messenger. This handset also comes with pre-loaded Facebook, Twitter and Hi5 applications.

Nokia X5-01 comes with Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. This handset allows you to download thousands of free as well as paid applications from the OVI Store. The in-built browser was pretty good. You can even download and install alternate browser such as Opera Mobile from the Ovi Store, in case you didn’t liked the default browser.

This handset does not fit properly in hands, thanks to the small and bulky design. Even during the call, I was not able to properly hear the voice. And holding the phone, during a call is a pain. Even a basic Nokia phone works perfectly, but this device has some issues, due to its squarish design. You might also have to face problems while carrying this device in your jeans pockets.

The battery of this device was pretty good. On a full charge, it managed to stay alive for more than 4 days with few calls, browsing, playing music, games and chatting. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard was quite comfortable. I was easily able to type text messages as well as status updates and tweets on the go.

Music:

Nokia X5-01 is a music phone, but it lacks physical previous/rewind and next/forward keys. The music player on this phone is similar to other X-series phones. It supports MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA audio formats. Nokia X5-01 also comes with the standard 3.5 mm audio jack. The music playback is pretty good, but the bundled headphones are not up to the mark. If you are planning to purchase this handset, as an alternate to your music player, then I would suggest you to connect your favorite pair of headphones in this handset to enjoy the music. It plays music for more than 20 hours on a single charge. This handset also comes with an unique feature, which allows you to play random songs, just by spinning the device.

Camera:

Nokia X5-01 features a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash. The maximum resolution for an image is 2592 x 1944 pixels. It has different scene modes such as Automatic, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night and Night Portrait. The self-timer allows you to automatically click a picture after an interval of 2, 10 or 20 seconds. The sequence mode lets you capture sequential images at a pre-defined interval of 10 seconds to 30 minutes. Most of the images were noisy in the night, but images clicked during the day were pretty good. Nokia X5-01 is not a camera phone, but the end results are quite impressive. Sadly, the video recording was not up to the mark.

Conclusion:

Nokia X5-01 is a pretty good phone, but it does not have any exceptional features. The headset provided in the box is not up to the mark. You should better, connect your favourite pair of headphones while listening to music. The much needed video camera and GPS is missing in this handset. Even though the slider is smooth and QWERTY keyboard is amazing, I had to face lots of problem while holding this handset during the call, thanks to its small and squarish design. Girls would love the design of this handset, but boys will definitely stay away from purchasing a girly handset. This handset comes with a price tag of Rs.9,974. If you are looking for a QWERTY handset, then I would suggest you to buy the Nokia E5 smartphone, since it has some great features, compared to this phone.

Pros:

* Excellent QWERTY keyboard
* Smooth slider
* Metallic sides and back
* Great music playback
* Excellent connectivity options
* Good battery life

Cons:

* Not-so-attractive design
* Display not clearly visible under sun-light
* Poor headphones
* Camera not up to the mark
* No front-facing camera
* No GPS

Nokia C5-03 Review

With entrants like Apple, Google, HTC etc in the smartphone market, Nokia has been feeling the heat for quite sometime now. The competition for Nokia has become even more challenging with the launch of Samsung Galaxy 5, Samsung Galaxy 5, Apple iPhone 4 and Google Nexus S. The Finnish mobile phone giant has been trying to rejuvenate itself in the market by launching several value rich smartphones and Nokia C5-03 touch-screen phone is a step in this direction. Read on to know what this phone stores for you.

Nokia C5-03 Design and Display

In terms of design, Nokia C5-03 looks very stylish and the metallic finish along with rounded edges gives the phone a robust look. The phone is quite compact measuring 105.8 x 51 x 13.8 mm and is very light on your pocket weighing just 93 grams.

The 3.2 inches TFT resistive touch screen is capable of displaying 16M colors of resolution measuring 360×640 pixels and comes with an accelerometer sensor for auto rotate. Though the display is not compelling enough when compared to other smartphones yet it is quite reasonable. Below the display you can locate 3 buttons namely Menu, End and Call. The phone is equipped with a TV out cable which lets you connect the phone to your TV sets.

Nokia C5-03 Full Specifications

Nokia C5-03 comes with a pre-installed a 2GB memory card which lets you store a large number of phone call records, photo calls etc. The memory can be increased up to 16GB. Some of the other technical specifications of the phone are

• Alert types: Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3 ringtones
• Speaker Phone: Yes
• CPU: ARM 11 600 MHz processor
• Games: Yes+ downloadable
• GPS: Yes, with A-GPS support; Nokia Maps
• Java: Yes, MIDP 2.1
• OS: Symbian OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5

Nokia C5-03 Connectivity and Networking

Nokia C5-03 offers you with a wide choice of connectivity options. There is support for 2G (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) and 3G network (HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100). There is support for GPRS (Class 32), EDGE (Class 32) and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g. Connectivity is further enhanced by Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP profile. The phone supports several third-party web browsers such as Opera Mobile, Opera Mini and Skyfire.

The phone is equipped with a stereo FM radio and offers a solid audio quality thanks the 3.3 mm audio jack. Nokia C5-03 supports all kind of audio and video formats such as MP4, 3GP, WAV, WMA, AAC etc.

Nokia C5-03 Colors

The phone is available is a wide range of colors such as Black, Petrol, Blue, Aluminum Grey, Graphite and Green.

Nokia C5-03 Camera And Video

The phone comes with a 5 mega-pixel camera which is capable of clicking pictures of resolution measuring 2592×1944 pixels. We were highly disappointed to find that the camera lacks autofocus and LED flash. So if you wish to click sharp pictures in dim light, you will be highly upset. Moreover, there is no lens protection thereby making the camera vulnerable to scratches.

Video quality is not up to the mark and the phone can shoot VGA at only @ 15 fps, which is highly unsatisfactory. Nokia C5-03 by no means can be termed as a camera phone.

Nokia C5-03 Battery

The phone is powered by a standard Li-Ion 1000 mAh battery which offers a standby up to 600 hours on 2G and up to 500 hours on 3G. The phone offers a talk-time of nearly 9 hours when operated on 2G and up to 4 hours when operated on 3G.

Nokia C5-03 Accessories

The phone comes with standard accessories such as battery, manual, charger and USB cable. You can buy other accessories of your need from the market.

Nokia C5-06 Launch Date

The phone announced in October 2010 has been released in December 2010

Nokia C5-03 Cost and Verdict

In UK, the phone is priced at £ 168 (approx) and in the US the phone can be snapped for $ 300 (approx). The cost of the phone in India is approximately Rs 10,500.

If you are looking for a budgetary smartphone then you can bank upon Nokia C5-03. But the phone’s poor camera and video quality coupled with its OS seems to work highly against it. With several Android phones filling the market, Nokia C5-03 will find it increasingly difficult to survive in the competition.

When you’re shopping on a budget, getting the most bang for your buck is what counts. And the Nokia X2 is keen to give you an exchange rate that’s hard to beat. This no-nonsense bar delivers a 5MP camera with flash, great audio with stereo speakers, dedicated music keys and a built-in antenna for the FM receiver.

Features like that can run up quite a bill at checkout – but not with the Nokia X2. Its price hovers around the 100 euro mark – a bargain for that feature set.

Not that there weren’t compromises made – here’s the rundown of what made the cut and what was scrapped.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
• 2.2″ 262K-color QVGA display
• 5 megapixel enhanced fixed-focus camera with LED flash
• QVGA video recording at 15fps
• Series 40 UI, 6th edition
• Dedicated Facebook app
• Bluetooth (with A2DP)
• Standard microUSB port (charging); USB On-The-Go
• Hot-swappable microSD card slot (16 GB supported)
• Stereo FM radio with RDS; built-in antenna
• 3.5mm audio jack
• Dedicated music keys
• Stereo speakers
• Excellent loudspeaker performance
• Great audio quality
• Aluminum back cover

Main disadvantages

• No 3G
• No GPS receiver
• No WLAN
• S40 is outdated and lacks multitasking
• No document viewer
• No smart dialing
• Below par still and video camera
• Wobbly microUSB port

The Nokia X2 is a lower midrange S40 phone and it shows when you look at the disadvantages. But most of those are under the hood and you likely won’t notice them right away. The back cover is made of aluminum and has a brushed metal finish that looks great.

The stereo speakers are loud and you don’t need the headphones to blast out that new song on the radio. And if that feels too retro, the microSD card slot is easily accessible. The Nokia X2 is true Xseries stuff and makes no excuses when it comes to music.

The Nokia X2 doesn’t overlook the biggest thing on the Internet since Google either. The dedicated Facebook app is pretty good (by non-touch phones’ standards).

And the 5MP camera with LED flash came as a bit of a surprise – that kind of camera usually goes on a mid-to-high end phones. Not all 5MP cameras are born equal though as we’ll see later on. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – we need to open the box first.

Modest retail package

The Nokia X2 comes in a small package with little inside: there’s a compact charger, a one-piece headset and a 2GB microSD card. There’s no USB cable – this we can understand, microUSB cables are very common and it helps keep the price down.

But the Nokia X2 supports USB On-The-Go and you’d need a convertor from male microUSB to female Type A (like the USB port on your computer) to use that. Now, those aren’t nearly as common. But without one you can’t use USB OTG – so, we’re guessing that it will remain a relatively unused feature.

Nokia X2 360-degree spin

The Nokia X2 stands at 111 x 47 x 13.3 mm – not the smallest phone around, especially considering that the 2.2” screen doesn’t take up much space. Still, the phone weighs just 81 grams and you can barely feel it in your hand.

Design and construction

The Nokia X2 is a low-priced phone but it doesn’t look cheap. The back cover is made of aluminum with brushed metal finish and with the embossed Nokia logo it looks pretty cool.
The front is more of an acquired taste. Still, the Xseries lineage is pretty obvious from the square corners and rounded sides and the red or blue accents do improve the looks somewhat

The Nokia X2 has a modestly sized 2.2” QVGA display. It’s bright with decent contrast (not the best we’ve seen on a Nokia phone though). What lets it down is its poor side viewing angles.

Sunlight legibility is sub-par too – obviously Nokia has cut corners with this one.

Below the display is the traditional arrangement of S40 buttons – a D-pad, two soft keys and two call keys. A reasonably sized D-pad dominates the flat layout. The call and soft keys feel just a bit squeezed up but still OK to use.

Below the display is the 12-key alphanumeric keypad. It’s the flatbed type but does have some bordering between keys on different rows and columns.

The keys are big enough but they are hard to press and with short stroke (the same goes for the call and soft keys). That’s a bit of a typing speed bump – the X2 is not a texter’s phone.

The three dedicated music keys on the left are the most prominent feature on the X2. They are big and easy to use and they can control both the music player and the radio.

The right side of the handset features the volume rocker, the microSD port hidden under a protective flap and the shutter key. The bottom of the phone is where the lanyard eyelet is.

There are three connection points at the top of the phone. The 3.5mm audio jack is on the left, the 2mm charger plug in the middle and the microUSB port (under its plastic cover) is on the right. The microUSB port is enabled for charging and handles USB On-The-Go too.

The USB port proved a little too wide, which let the cable wobble. Often we’d plug in the cable but the phone wouldn’t start charging. If you’re not careful, the Nokia X2 might run out of juice, even though you thought you charged it all night.

As we already mentioned, the back cover on the Nokia X2 is made of aluminum, but that’s not all that’s interesting about the back. The fixed-focus 5MP camera and LED flash are here and there’s a latch for opening the cover.

There are stereo speakers on the back – one grill is on top, the other is at the bottom. The grills are split in two, but that’s for decorative purposes only. The top speaker is under the left half of the grill and the bottom one is under the right half.

The back of the X2 has a slight curve to it, so the speakers don’t get completely muffled when you put the phone down on a flat surface. There’s some distortion of the sound though (not entirely unexpected).

Under the back panel you can find the 860 mAh Li-Ion BL-4C battery, which powers the Nokia X2. The battery is quoted at up to 624 hours of stand-by, up to 13 hours and 30 minutes of talk-time and up to 27 hours of music playback. Many users however report they’re only getting around 5 hours of talk time.

The aluminum cover brings a little class to the Nokia X2, which is otherwise all plastic. The build quality is very good – except for the wobbly USB port – and the ergonomics are alright too. The keys are big enough even though it’s obviously not the best keyboard for texting.

The tapered corners shave off some of that 13.3mm of thickness, at least that’s how the X2 feels in the hand. The phone is rather tall, but other than that it’s easily pocketable.

User interface – more of the same

The Nokia X2 is powered by the Series 40 6th edition software – it should be familiar to everyone now.

The vast reach of Nokia means that many people have at some point used an S40 device. But old glory aside, S40 still has important features missing and things that need polishing – even in the 6th edition.

Anyway, familiarity is not a bad thing. Plus, the UI is simple and fairly intuitive so you can get going right away, you don’t need special tips to use the Nokia X2.

Active standby mode (or Home screen mode, as Nokia call it here) is available as usual. It divides the screen in four sections that can be scrolled with the D-pad and edited as users see fit. By default, the clock is on top, then the music and radio player and the Shortcut bar, which grants instant access to favorite functions and applications.

You can of course customize that – rearrange things and add or replace things.

A handy feature is that pressing the end key while the keypad is locked brings up a clock that shows the time and date.

The main menu has the usual 6th edition views – Grid, Grid with labels, List and Single (which displays one icon at a time, like S30).

As usual, there’s no multitasking support – if you’re running, say, Opera Mini you can’t read an incoming SMS or use most other features of the phone. Thanks to the dedicated music keys you can at least change the track (or radio station) and if there’s an incoming call, the app will be paused while you take it. You can’t make outgoing calls until you exit the app though.

Regular phonebook

The phonebook of the Nokia X2 will store up to 2000 contacts, which isn’t as good as unlimited storage but should do for 99% of the users out there. You can set the phonebook to display contacts from the phone memory, SIM memory or both.

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.

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.

Telephony is decent

The signal reception on the Nokia X2 was good, though not the best we’ve had. The in-call sound was crisp and clear though not very loud even at the highest setting.

There’s no smart dialing on the X2 – not surprising for an S40 device. There’s no voice dialing either, nor the Voice Clarity sound enhancement many other S40 phones have.

Messaging is OK

The messaging department is certainly up to the task. The Nokia X2 is capable of handling all the common message types including SMS, MMS, as well as flash and audio messages and there’s easy email handling too.

The keyboard on the X2 is not the heavy texter kind. Other than that, there’s nothing missing – Conversations is here too (that’s the threaded message feature). Actually, Conversations replaces the regular Inbox.

The editor is well organized and you won’t spend too much time finding your way around. You type your message (there’s a character counter and message part counter available) and when you’re done you pick the recipient from the contacts list, the recently used numbers, the call log or contact groups. You can have a favorite contact too (just one).

The email client does pretty well to meet most user needs. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email accounts. The email client supports SSL, which enables it to handle a Gmail account for example.

Setting up the email client was extremely easy. It just required an email address and entering and confirming the password – the Nokia X2 took care of the rest.

We did have some issues at first – the Email app had disappeared, but that was probably some bug. We tried flashing the firmware (from V4.25 to V4.80) and the problem was sorted.

Photo gallery and file browser go their separate ways

The S40 Gallery app used to try being too many things at once and being a photo gallery wasn’t among its strong points. Now, there’s a separate icon in the main menu – Photos, which serves the one and only purpose of viewing the photos and videos on your phone.

The functionality is pretty much the same, but at least the Photo gallery gets rid of the cruft of file managing features and leaves only the image-related stuff in.

The Photos app on the Nokia X2 offers only a single viewing mode, displaying a grid of 12 pictures on the screen. You can switch to landscape mode from the menu though – it makes better use of the screen real estate when you open a photo (there are black bars in portrait mode).

Zooming in on a single picture is pretty comfortable with the zoom in and out shortcuts placed on the middle and right soft keys. It’s also fast and relatively smooth, even for 5MP images.

You can organize photos into albums, view them in a timeline (they are ordered by the date they were taken) and of course you can set up a slide show.

As for the regular Gallery app, it’s still here – but it’s hidden in the Applications menu. It’s quite a capable file manager, especially for a feature phone. It can manage folders and files – both one by one and in bulk.

A good music player

The music player of the Nokia X2 has decent looks and a solid set of features. It has great all-round functionality, including album art, and a fair number of formats are supported.

The music player is controlled either via the dedicated touch keys or the D-pad. Songs can be filtered by artist, album and genre. The player handles AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, WMA, AMR-NB. Naturally the A2DP profile is supported, allowing the use of stereo Bluetooth earphones.

As usual, the artist and title of the currently playing song are shown on the homescreen. They appear in the Radio and music area on the homescreen so they need to be enabled in the Homescreen mode settings for the info to be displayed.

The music player has an equalizer with presets and two customizable settings along with Stereo widening.

Of course, the Nokia X2 has another feature to enhance its music performance besides the dedicated keys – the stereo speakers. They are set wide apart and are quite loud – no portable speakers needed with the X2.

FM radio has RDS and built-in antenna

An alternative to the preloaded content on X2 is the FM radio. It matches the music player interface and covers all basic functions. The great thing here is that it has a very sensitive built-in antenna – no need to plug in the headphones for the radio to work.

RDS support is available and you can make the handset search and save all available stations in your area. RDS info and frequency appear on the homescreen, much like with the music player.

Video player is pretty basic

Unlike music playback, video is not the Nokia X2’s strong suit – the small, low-res, 4:3 screen rules out regular use as a dedicated video player.

It’s not uncommon for feature phones to include DivX/XviD support, but the X2 supports only MP4 and 3GP. Those are good enough for casual viewing, we guess.

Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, fast-forwarded or rewound and that’s that.

There are reports of the X2 hanging during video playback – we couldn’t replicate it, but judging by the number of complaints it’s a relatively common problem. Nokia’s R&D department is working on the problem, which is reportedly related to some memory cards.

Audio quality is great

Nokia X2 is one of the quieter phones we have recorded in our audio quality test. However it makes up for that with rather clean output both with and without headphones attached.

The frequency response is great on both occasions perfect and so are the noise level and the dynamic range. Distortions are well kept under control and despite the stereo crosstalk increasing when headphones come into play, it still remains perfectly tolerable.

Sub-par fixed-focus 5MP camera

The Nokia X2 boasts an impressive sounding (for a low end phone) 5 megapixel camera with LED flash – but there’s no autofocus. The maximum image resolution is 2592×1944 pixels. The LED flash doubles as a torch and is quite good at it – but as an actual photo flash, it’s only good at close range.

Typical Series 40, the camera settings are rather limited but we can’t expect more given the price of around 100 euro. The available settings include white balance, various effects and a self timer.

While impressive as a number, the 5 megapixels of the Nokia X2 camera fail to impress. We know better than to ride a phone that tries to offer so much for so little price, but the camera is a showcase of various imaging problems.

Sometimes, photos ended up as .NRW (“Nokia RAW”, not Nikon RAW) files when we tried offloading the photos right after they were taken. If that happens, open the gallery and after it’s done updating the photos will be ready to go. This only happens if you try to copy photos immediately after they were taken though.

The images are very noisy despite the noise reduction applied. On the other hand, compression is way too heavy. These two combined seem to bring down the practical resolution of the X2 camera to way below 5MP. There’s also the obvious oversharpening and nasty purple fringing too.

Poor video recording

Things don’t get any better when it comes to video recording. The X2 manages QVGA resolution at 20 fps that only seem good enough for an occasional MMS. But video recording uses a lot of processing power that the X2 can’t afford so that’s understandable.

Low-end connectivity

The Nokia X2 tries to look like it costs double what it actually does and it works. But it can’t offer much in terms of value added features. You get quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP.

The microUSB port is the easiest way to transfer files and charge the phone (you can’t always find a 2mm charger, but microUSB cables are common enough). The easily accessible microSD card can help with bulk data transfers.

That’s it for the connectivity on the Nokia X2 – no 3G (but no screen or browser for it either), no GPS, no Wi-Fi.

Opera Mini is the browser of choice

The default browser on the Nokia X2 is Opera Mini 4.2. It’s a tradition for S40 phones, but there’s a new version available, which offers some new goodies – such as multiple tabs, among others.

The way Mini works is the page is rendered on Opera’s servers and sent into lighter format to the device, with the images compressed. While this somewhat spoils the quality, on a small screen (as most low-power devices that rely on the Mini have) you can’t tell the difference.

The difference in image quality aside, the compression really saves on data charges.

Organizer and apps

The organizer of the Nokia X2 is very elaborate, offering a large number of time management applications with nice features and a user-friendly interface. The calendar has month, week, and day modes and five types of events to set up.

The alarm clock is repeatable: it can be set to go off on any selected days of the week, even when the phone is switched off. You can also customize the snooze time if you wish.

The other organizing functions available include a voice recorder with a 60-minute limit, a stopwatch and a countdown timer.

The Nokia X2 calculator offers two versions – basic and advanced. In addition a loan calculator is also available.

The consistently useful unit converter tops the list of additional applications. It offers all kinds of converting options and, if provided with enough information about the rates, offers currency conversion too. There’s a size converter too, for clothing and shoe sizes.

If you are into sharing images, video and audio files with your buddies straight from your handset have a look at Ovi Share. After a quick sign-up process, selecting files for uploading is easy enough.

This app is limited, you can only browse your and your friends’ uploads. For general browsing you’d need a web browser and Opera Mini failed to sign in. Bear in mind that 5 megapixel photos can cost you quite a bit at the end of the month if you’re not on an unlimited data plan.

The Search application offers Google Search or Bing Search initially, though other search engines might be available depending on your country and region. Searching launches the web browser, which makes this app somewhat useless. Or rather, it would have been if Nokia used Opera Mini 5, which has a handy search bar.

The World clock can tell the time in any time zone at the cost of only a few clicks.

Finally, there’s the Facebook app. It’s a pretty capable piece of software – you can manage your profile and post status updates, but also browse your friends’ profiles and photos. There’s even an option to take a photo right in the app and upload it.

What’s missing though is the ability to receive notifications of new messages and status updates – you can’t run the Facebook app in the background and there’s no panel to put on the Active standby, like there was on the Nokia C3 for example.

Ovi Store for S40

The Ovi Store on S40 works much like on S60 smartphones. Browsing the Ovi Store, you can choose between several sections – Applications, Games, Audio and Video content, Personalization, Recommended and of course, My Stuff, which shows you the apps you’ve already installed.

The structure of the Ovi Store client is simple – a list with the name and logo for each app (or podcast, or whatever), the category it’s in (Entertainment, Utilities, etc), price and a three star rating.

Selecting an app, gives you more details – a description, info on size, reviews by people who have tried it, rating (three stars max), the option to write a review yourself or send the description page to a friend, a list of related apps and a Report issue button, which helps you report fraud, spam, abuse, etc., but not bug reports or feature requests.

Many games on board

The Nokia X2 comes with quite a few games pre-installed. They are full versions, so you can look forward to periods of trying to master the deceptively simple City Bloxx.

Final words

Typical Series 40 phone, the Nokia X2 didn’t have many major disappointments in store. There’s not much to rave about either. The camera was the only really questionable feature, though some of the software issues are off-putting too.

Software problems are fixable with a firmware update but there isn’t much to do about the poor camera module and processing. Of course, given the 100-euro price tag you should be prepared for the small screen and the modest in-box accessories.

But still, the excellently performing stereo speakers and the built-in FM antenna perform admirably and audio output on the headphones was very good too. And that’s the core functionality of an Xseries device like the Nokia X2.

The Nokia X2 offers a lot for its price, though we can’t help but be disappointed with the implementation. Still, if it’s the music player that’s the main feature you’re after, the Nokia X2 delivers a good experience along with a nice design and ergonomics. Just be warned that you might hit a few bumps in the road with the rest of the features.

After years of watching their rivals introduce one dual SIM phone after another, a few months back Nokia finally decided to join them and unveiled its first mobile phones capable of accommodating two SIM cards at the same time. Eager to see what it held in store, we took one of them, the Nokia C1-00, for a spin around our testing grounds.

Instead of even bothering to catch up with the competition, the Finns chose to play the game by their own rules and made their first steps into the dual SIM mobile phone market by announcing a couple of entry level devices. No luster and certainly nothing groundbreaking, these devices (including the C1-00) pack only the most basic of features.

So, you get what you pay for. And what you need. Which is dual SIM telephony. The Nokia C1-00 works with two SIM cards and comes with a color display, a built-in FM radio and a handy flashlight.

Here’s the pros and cons of getting a Nokia C1-00.

Key features:

• Entry level dual SIM feature phone
• Dual-band GSM support (GSM 900/1800 MHz), no dual standby
• 1.8″ 65K-color display of 128-by-160-pixel resolution
• FM radio
• Flashlight
• Low price
• Promising 1020mAh battery

Main disadvantages:

• Only one SIM card is active at a time
• Keypad not comfy enough
• No memory card slot
• No support for GPRS, EDGE or Bluetooth

As the short specs sheet reveals, there is no camera on the C1-00 back, and there is no need to look for a memory card slot either – you won’t find any. However, it would’ve been more surprising to actually see those on a 30-euro mobile phone. Long story short, the Nokia C1-00 feature pack is actually just fine.

What isn’t, though, is the phone’s dual SIM functionality. While this still is a dual SIM capable device, there is no dual standby on board. In other words, only one of the two inserted SIM cards is active at a time while the inactive one is unreachable.

Despite that, the Nokia C1-00 is still quite useful. You don’t need to turn off the phone each time you want to toggle the active SIM card, and let’s not forget that the C1-00 is among the most affordable phones out there.

Let’s see what else is under the Nokia C1-00 hood. Join us on the next page to take a look at the phone’s design and construction.

Nokia C1-00 unboxed

The Nokia C1-00 comes in a plain cardboard box. Other than the phone itself, you’ll get the typical basic accessories: a charger and the good old one-piece handsfree that ends in a 3.5mm audio jack. It comes in handy when making phone calls while driving or when using the FM radio (the phone lacks a built-in antenna). There’s, of course, a manual too.

Nokia C1-00 360-degree spin

The Nokia C1-00 isn’t exactly the most compact of basic feature phones at 107.1 x 45 x 15 mm but it would still fit in most pockets or purses.

The C1-00 tips the scales at 72.9 grams, which is perfectly acceptable. The thing is made of plastic that looks and feels cheap, but that’s to be expected from such an inexpensive device.

Nevertheless, the Nokia C1-00 feels robust enough and handles with ease.

Design and construction

The Nokia C1-00 comes in many flavors – Medium Blue, Light Gray, Sea Green, and Red (like the one paying us a short visit). We can hardly call the C1-00 design attractive but the phone is still nice looking (especially some of its color variants).

Both the front and the back of the phone are made of matt fingerprint-proof plastic which may not look expensive but it sure does the job.

Half of the C1-00 front is taken up by the 65K-color TFT display. It measures 1.8 inches and is of 128 x 160 pixel resolution. The image quality is surprisingly good for this price range and so is sunlight legibility. Right above the display we find the centrally located earpiece.

Underneath the screen is the navigation deck built around a D-pad with no center button in it (confirmation is now made using the left soft key).

While the four buttons surrounding the D-pad are very comfortable and feature a nice tactile feedback, the D-pad is kind of hard to press but in time you get used to it.

Except for navigation, the D-pad is also used to quickly turn on and off the inbuilt flashlight. Pressing twice up starts the flashlight and to switch it off, just press the D-pad once again in the same direction.

As for the numberpad underneath, all keys feature great tactile feedback and even if there is no space between them, they are still very user-friendly. Their only downside is the annoying click sound produced each time you press a button.

If you want to switch from one active SIM card to another, press and hold the asterisk key, while the phone is in standby mode.

The left side of the handset is bare while the right one only hosts the 2mm charger plug.

On the Nokia C1-00 top we find the flashlight we mentioned a second ago as well as the standard 3.5mm audio jack right next to it. The phone can’t be used as a portable music player but there is at least an FM radio on board.

Except for the Nokia logo and the speakerphone grill, there is nothing on the Nokia C1-00 back. Underneath there is the 1020mAh Li-Ion battery (BL-5C) which is quoted at up to the unbelievable 48 days of stand-by or up to 13 hours of talk-time.

Since we spent only a few days reviewing the phone we can’t give you exact real life battery life numbers. We had to charge the C1-00 battery only once – when starting our review.

Nice build quality is great to have in an entry level handset. The C1-00 delivers on ergonomics too – typing is excellent and navigation is a breeze. Two SIM card slots and a standard 3.5mm audio jack along with a built-in FM radio – not bad at all for the price you pay.

Series 30 user interface

The C1-00 runs Nokia’s Series 30 UI. The only thing to suggest that you’re actually holding a dual SIM capable phone is the tiny SIM1 (or SIM2) label in the center of the homescreen and the indicator in the upper left corner telling you which is the currently active SIM card.

The main menu has two different view modes: a grid of icons or a list of items. As usual, the color background of the entire menu, as well as the wallpaper on the display, can be easily modified by changing the active theme. The menu responds nicely (with occasional lags).

There are six predefined ringing profiles on the Nokia C1-00 and on top of them you get an additional user-customizable one. These should be enough to suit practically any situation you could possible face.

While browsing the menu we encountered quite a lot preloaded applications – Converter, Spreadsheet (turned out to be what we used to know as the Expense manager), countdown timer, stopwatch, and even a melody composer. Geez, we thought those were a thing of the past already. Actually, there’s no other way to add custom ringtones, so that’s something.

Also on board there are three games – Bounce, Sudoku, and Forbidden Treasures. And as we mentioned before, the C1-00 also comes with an FM radio (the enclosed headset serves as an antenna since the phone lacks a built-in one).

Interestingly, the Nokia C1-00 has no web browser.

The S30 UI turned out to be user-friendly and responsive enough. If this isn’t your first Nokia device, you shouldn’t have any difficulties getting used to the user interface. There are no goodies such as multi-tasking or active standby but those aren’t to expect on a device priced at 30 euro.

Dual SIM phonebook and telephony

The phonebook of the Nokia C1-00 stores up to 500 contacts – as far as most people are concerned, this is as good as unlimited storage. The phonebook is typical S30 and holds no surprises.

As far as the dual SIM functionality is concerned, contacts on both SIM cards are displayed at the same time, however, you can only add, edit or delete contacts from the currently active SIM card. On the other hand, you can send a message or call any of the contacts no matter if its card is currently active or not.

Each contact can be assigned only one number. There are no extra fields. The way contacts are displayed is user-configurable – a list of names, numbers or names and numbers. Setting up quick dial shortcuts gives you quick access to the most used contacts.

Another interesting C1-00 feature is the Multi-phonebook. The Nokia C1-00 packs support for up to 5 separate phonebooks allowing multiple users to store there own contacts on a single device. Shared contacts are accessible from all phonebooks, while the others are kept private.

As for the telephony, the in-call sound is strong and clear. Vibration strength is not very impressive though.

As we’ve already pointed out, even if the phone is dual SIM capable, only one of the cards can be active at a time. This means the other card will unreachable so in order to receive calls and messages on the inactive number you’ll need to activate it. There’s a quick shortcut for that – just press-and-hold on the asterisk (or star) key.

If you don’t want to miss a call even if the card is currently inactive, you can always divert incoming calls to another phone number (including the active one), however, make sure to contact your service provider for more information on the costs. The handset has an easy Dual SIM menu, which makes forwarding calls between both SIM cards not only easy, but also automatic – should you choose to.

Since there was no way to transfer our tones used for the traditional loudspeaker test, we weren’t able to run it. However, the Nokia C1-00 sounds quite loud and missed calls are only likely in noisier environments.

Final words

The last dual SIM phone we reviewed came with features like a touchscreen, Wi-Fi support and a 5-megapixel camera on board and this little fella, the Nokia C1-00, doesn’t even have a web browser. Or a memory card slot. But it’s cheap. And that seems to be its only advantage over the competition.

The C1-00 is a dual SIM phone, but it’s not a Dual standby phone. And that’s an important difference. The C1-00 doesn’t make use of both SIM cards simultaneously. Instead, only one SIM card is active at a time.

We had a really hard time coming up with possible real-life scenarios where the limited Dual SIM functionality would actually be useful. In the end we gave up – perhaps Nokia never meant to use it as a key selling feature. The flashlight and FM radio sound way more practical.

Plus some carriers have been offering dual-number SIM cards for quite some time and since they work the same as Dual SIM telephony on the C1-00, you might as well get one of those and keep your current phone.

We guess the Nokia C1-00 won’t be a big hit on the Dual SIM phone market, but despite that, the price of around 30 euro is low enough to make it a bestseller with or without it.

Read on for our complete hands-on Nokia N8 review.

Nokia N8 overview

The Nokia N8 is Nokia’s flagship smartphone for 2010, and comes crammed with so many superb hardware features, it’s difficult to know where to start! If you were a fan of the feature-phone craze a few short years ago, when the mobile manufacturers competed to squeeze as many features into their phones as they possibly could, then you’re going to love the N8! Not only does it come with every feature you can think of, each is pretty much best in class.

Take it camera, for example. It’s not just a camera on a phone, it’s the best camera there’s ever been on a phone – and that’s no exaggeration! Video, too, is handled with ease, and with an HDMI output and Dolby 5.1 surround sound, the N8 is genuinely a multimedia computer.

So from the outset, the N8 looks extremeley promising. Let’s take a closer look at its features.

What you’ll love about the Nokia N8

For camera and video enthusiasts, as well as Nokia fanboys, the Nokia N8 is an outstanding piece of kit. The following is just a small list of what you can expect to find on Nokia’s latest and greatest:

• Take professional quality photos with the best camera of any phone – ever!
• 12 megapixel camera, xenon flash, auto-focus, Carl Zeiss optics, mechanical shutter, and an unrivalled amount of settings let you take photos that are better than your average digital camera
• Shoot HD videos through the same 12 megapixel camera
• Imagine capturing video of your kid’s first school play, or just a night on the town, in glorious widescreen 720p HD that looks flawless on your HDTV – just by pointing your N8 at the scene and pressing record.
• Your videos are also recorded with superb sound quality thanks to the N8′s ability to tune out wind noise and control recording levels in harsh audio environments
• And don’t worry about capturing your mates’ shenanigans in a dark club – the N8 has settings for low light, white balance an dcolour tone, ensuring you capture the best video wherever you are
• Secondary front-facing camera lets you make video calls
• Playback true HD-quality films on an HDTV at 720p resolution, thanks to the N8′s huge memory (16GB internal + up to 32GB from a MicroSD card) and its HDMI output
• Listen to your movies in superb Dolby 5.1 surround sound
• Watch WebTV or YouTube videos on the N8′s stunning 3.5″ touchscreen, which, with its 16 million colours and use of Nokia’s brand new Clear Black Display technology, shows deeper blacks and greater contrast than any other phone on the market
• Listen to your tunes in style with the Ovi Music player, Ovi Music Unlimited service, and excellent quality sound
• Superb gaming phone thanks to its built-in graphics processor.

And that’s not even mentioning the usual plethora you get with smartphones, including WiFi, 10Mbps HSDPA, new Web browser, accelerometer, GPS, compass, FM radio, YouTube, Bluetooth 3, and anything else you care to mention!

The Nokia N8′s features in more detail

Some of the N8′s features are simply unique, and so deserve a bit more attention paying to them, so I’ll cover those here.

The N8′s camera

Of course, the most obvious feature is the camera. It is, simply, superb. The specs alone don’t do it justice.

Firstly, its 12 megapixels ensure your pics are still nice and sharp when they’re blown up to a decent size. The Carl Zeiss optics add to the clarity of the pictures you take, while the Xenon flash ensures great quality pics even in low light.

But great pictures aren’t all about megapixels. The N8 has a larger optical format image sensor than most camera phones (1/1.83″), which allows it effectively to see more light. The Xenon flash has an automatic red-eye removal, while the face detection software automatically keeps the focus on any face in the picture.

If you prefer to tweak your camera’s settings, you’ll be pleased to know that with the N8, all the following features are fully adjustable:

All of this means you can take great quality pictures wherever you happen to be.

When photos are taken, they’re automatically geotagged thanks to the N8′s built-in GPS receiver, and the onboard image gallery will let you zoom in and out of your picks using the sam pinch-zoom feature found on the Apple iPhone.

Video

Video on the N8 is the best in class. Sure, other phones can record video at 720p, but not all of them can play it back complete with 5.1 Dolby surround sound over an HDMI cable. The N8 can.

At the Nokia World 2010 event, Nokia showed an N8 playing Angels and Demons on a 50″ plasma TV, with the video and music pumped through the N8′s HDMI port to a home theatre box, and the results were superb. True 720p picture and surround sound from a phone. Incredible.

Better still, you can record your own videos with the same quality in glorious 16:9 widescreen format. You can even edit them on the phone, as the N8 comes with built-in video-editing software.

Games

The N8 has a built-in graphics processor, which, combined with its accelerometer, means that 3D games don’t just look good, even when shown on a large HDTV, they’re extremely intuitive to play as well. Nokia showed off Angry Birds at Nokia World 2010, the popular puzzle game that’s set the mobile gaming world on fire. On the N8, with its superb screen and fast graphics processor, Angry Birds, plays superbly.

Web browsing and Email

Nokia were one of the first companies to use the WebKit browser (the browser that Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome are both based on), and this continues to be the case with the N8. The browser is extremely rich, and although it doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash, it does at least support Flash Lite.

The browser isn’t quite as good as the browsers found on the iPhone and Android phones, it has to be said, simply because moving the page with your finger around isn’t quite as fluid as its competitors. It seems Nokia still hasnt quite got its head around the competition!

As far as email is concerned, the N8 excels, supporting just about every email application and protocol that exists. including:

• Yahoo! Mail
• Gmail
• Windows Live
• Hotmail
• POP/IMAP services
• Mail for Exchange (i.e. Outlook)
• IBM Lotus traveler

All of these email protocols are supported and can be accessed from the one unified email client.

Navigation

Finally, the N8′s maps are also pretty good. Nokia pioneered the use of GPS in phones, and after buying Navteq, one of the world’s largest mapping companies, a few years ago, its Ovi Maps app is now right at the head of the curve. Better still, with Ovi Maps, all of the maps that you need can be stored on the N8 itself, so you don’t need to worry about losing your mobile connection, or getting stung for a horrendous amount of money if you use maps when on holiday abroad.

Ovi Maps also provides free car and pedestrian navigation, giving you turn-by-turn directins to your destination.

What you won’t like about the N8

The N8 has come out in a giant wave of hype, and it is an extremely impressive device. It does, however, come with a big drawback. Its hardware is superb, in places leaps ahead of its rivals, and the camera is genuinely better than any other mobile phone’s before it. Its software, and in particular its user interface, though, really lets it down.

The N8 is the first phone to use Symbian^3, Nokia’s latest redesign of its venerable Symbian mobile OS. Unfortunately, despite Nokia’s claims about how much better the new Symbian is, and the fact that it can multi-task 25 apps simultaneously (just try that on an iPhone!), it still looks old, dated and clunky.

If you remember how Windows Mobile 6.5 felt, you’ll know what I mean. Symbian^3 is good when looked at alone, but compared with the competition, it’s staid, with little or no nice touches that we expect from smartphones these days. For example, the new Windows Phone 7 mobile OS is beautifully responsive, with lovely animated transitions when you move from screen to screen, and a neat kinetic scroll feature that causes lists to bounce slightly when you reach their end.

The N8 has none of that. Lists simply scroll down. No fuss, no drama. Just scroll. Likewise, screens swipe from one to the next. No animation. No transition. Just slide. Perhaps it’s the Finish way?!

The result is a phone that’s perfectly good when looked at on its own, and certainly worthy of a flagship phone. But one that, ultimately, is still not as good as the competition, at least in terms of its user interface. And for Nokia, that’s disappointing.

Conclusion – should you buy the Nokia N8?

In conclusion, the Nokia N8 is not the phone it should have been. Nokia should have released a phone that wasn’t just better than its competitors in terms of hardware, its user interface should have been better as well. Much better.

The fact that it’s not means I won’t be buying one.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. If you want the best camera phone on the market bar none, then you have no choice. You have to buy the Nokia N8, as it’s camera is leagues ahead of every other phone, without question.

Equally, its video recording features are suiperb, as are all the other features I’ve mentioned here. It is, perhaps, the best feature phone ever developed.

Unfortunately, the world has moved away from feature phones, and true smartphones need great apps, a beautiful and intuitive user interface, and seamless integration with social media and Web apps. It’s this aspect that the Nokia N8 falls short on.

If you want the world’s best feature phone, buy the Nokia N8. If you’re a Nokia fanboy and you want the best phone that Nokia have ever produced, then buy the Nokia N8.

But if you want your smartphone to be, well, smart, and connected with the mobile Web and your social media apps, then you’d be better off with a top-end Android phone, such as the new HTC Desire HD or the Samsung Galaxy S, or even the iPhone.

The Nokia C3 looks at first glanced like a Nokia E72, but essentially it is a stripped down phone geared towards youngsters with a range of social networking applications at its heart.

For a phone that costs from £80 in Britain on Pay as you Go, the C3 has plenty going for. Despite running on Nokia’s Series 40 platform, the C3 is unusually blessed with WiFi and Bluetooth. In addition to that it has a decent 2MP camera which is fine for taking web-destined pictures. If you expect anything more then you will be disappointed.

It also has a 3.5mm headphone slot for music listening on the top, a standard Nokia charger port, micro USB port and micro SDHC. It is bundled with a 2GB microSDHC card. The C3 has no support for 3G, but GPRS is fine with Opera Mini. It is powered by a Nokia BL-5J battery (1320mAh) which is fine for up to 800 hours of standby time, according to Nokia anyway.

The display is a standard 2.4″ screen with QVGA resolution, and performs well outdoors. Mind, we haven’t been getting plenty of sunshine lately so I was unable to test the display under full sunlight glare – but will update when and if we ever get our summer back.

Below the screen resides two soft keys, two applications keys and a call and disconnect (which also doubles as power on/off) buttons. Below those is the QWERTY keypad. The keypad is similar in feel to the more expensive E72, though the space bar is also far larger (like the E71). Commonly used punctuations are easily accessible.

Series 40 is a rather dated platform and a step down the ladder from the more versatile and mainstream Symbian Series 60 smartphone platform. It does not support multi-tasking, but it works well despite its rather dated look and use of large fonts. Opening applications can be a very slow process. The problem is Nokia should be pushing the ‘smarter’ S60 onto lower end phones like this.

Nokia markets the C3 as a messaging phone for youngsters. With the QWERTY keypad, typing messages is a breeze. It has support for the most popular messaging platforms such as SMS, email and popular instant messaging platforms such as Yahoo! Messenger, MSN via Ovi Chat. There is also Opera Mini 4 installed for all your web browsing need.

As social networking booms, Nokia has included a Communities application for Twitter and Facebook. It is a J2ME application, so loading or starting it up can take a while and it does not run in the background. It does integrate itself neatly on the homescreen though, but you will have to launch the app in order to reply.

As a Twitter client, Communities has some good features, but personally I feel that the C3 is too slow to be of any use. It takes a long time to scroll through messages and replies. Anyone who follows more than 50 twitter users will likely find it a chore and would be better off downloading Twibble or using dabr.co.uk instead.

The sound quality from the music player is rather good, and with a microSDHC slot and 2GB card already provided, the C3 makes for a decent music player. Equally good is the call quality and signal strength. It never dropped a call on me once, but that isn’t surprising – the telephone bit of any phones has always been Nokia’s strength.

It is hard to fault the C3. It is a great device with brilliant built quality and has features many would not expect in such a cheap device. For £80 (EUR100) on Pay as you Go, you get a great looking device with a wonderful QWERTY keypad built around messaging. Shame the software isn’t up to it.

Pros

+ Great QWERTY keypad

+ Built-in WiFi

+ Good Twitter and Facebook integration

Cons

- Slow processor

- Series 40

- Poor camera quality