Nokia C2-02 – Simple looks

By admin - 24 Aug 2011

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Price : Rs. 4,949

Nokia smartphones are struggling to keep up against Android phones that have been storming the market off late. Their squad of feature phones too are under pressure and the Finnish manufacturer is now leaning on Windows Phones devices heavily in order to revive their fortunes. Nokia C2-02 is one of the trio of phones that Nokia recently launched. The highlight of the phones is their user-friendly interface and low price tag. Nokia’s Touch and Type series phones have been doing well in the market too.

The list of flaws on the Nokia C2-02 is quite similar. This handset has touchscreen technology but multitasking and smart dialing aren’t available here. This can be a deal breaker because other competing models in this price range do have it.

What do you get in the package?

• Nokia C2-02
• Hands free kit
• 2 GB microSD card
• Charger

Noteworthy here is that the manufacturer hasn’t put in a microUSB cable and you will have to buy it separately.

Design

Nokia C2-02 is 103×51.4×17 mm and it is a really compact screen with 2.6 inches screen size. The phone is thick due to the slider form factor used. The handset feels chubby in the hand but it is still nice and friendly. The weight of the phone isn’t surprising at 115 grams. The manufacturer has used a clean and simple design here which doesn’t call any attention. This isn’t the slimmest of phones around and it doesn’t have an expensive finish either but the looks are still OK.

On the bottom, there is a rounded faux metal bottom along with a nice matte plastic work which work well in combo for giving the phone a professional and solid looking feel. One gripe I had is that the phone easily attracts a lot of fingerprints.

This is a slider phone and the keyboard is located below the top half of the device. Left side of the phone is totally bare except for the microphone pinhole. The right side has volume rocker, lanyard eyelet, and slider for screen lock. On the top, there is a 3.5 mm headphones jack along with microUSB input and a 2mm Nokia charger plug. You cannot charge this phone through USB.

Display

Nokia C2-02 has a 2.6 inches touchscreen display having a resolution of 320×240 pixels. The quality of the display isn’t anything spectacular but this isn’t unacceptable for its price point. This is resistive touch screen; it would be crazy to expect a high quality capacitive touchscreen at such a low point. Due to the resistive technology used, you will need to poke at the screen harder. That said, you still get haptic feedback; there are soft and gentle vibrations acknowledging your input.

Nokia C2-02 display doesn’t have manual brightness settings and there is no ambient light sensor too.

Music player

Nokia C2-02 music player is almost the same; there are no changes except for the touch support. It is still decent looking with a good set of features like album art. The music player can play formats of AAC, eAAC+, AAC+, MP3, AMR-NB, and WMA. There is support for A2DP profile and hence you can use Bluetooth earphones for listening to music. One annoying feature here is that if you want to run the music player in the background then you will need to go to ‘Options’ and then click on ‘Play in background’. Simply pressing the red (call end) button will close the music player and take you back to home screen.

During my tests, I found that the music player interface was a bit laggy. There is no equalizer either which is disappointing.

FM radio

Nokia C2-02 comes with FM radio and it is quite similar to the music player interface. You get all the basic functions that you’d expect. The FM radio feature can record broadcasts but this feature is regional.

Video player

A lot of touchscreen S40 Nokia phones can play XviD file formats but the Nokia C2-02 cannot. In my tests, I could only play QVGA quality videos in 3GP or MP4. Higher resolution videos won’t play and you cannot run XviD either. The player controls are quite simple. You get play/pause button with next and previous keys and there is also an option for going full screen.

Camera

Nokia C2-02 has two megapixels camera with fixed focus snapper and the maximum resolution is 1,600×1,200 pixels. The software of the camera has been updated so have some new goodies here. When you go in to the camera app, you will see a virtual shutter button located in the middle and the options and back keys are located close to it. The camera can be used in both portrait and landscape mode but I will recommend you to use the latter.

Tapping on the screen will show you more controls like resolution, photos remaining, white balance, 3 video camera mode shortcuts, self-timer, gallery, and digital zoom controls. They hide when not used and hence don’t take up a lot of screen space. Image quality is pretty good considering this is a two megapixels shooter. Photos look noisy but post processing, these noises get masked and at least in the brighter areas. But there is a lot of noise in the shadows. The colour and contrast rendering is good and amount of the captured detail is as good as what you’d expect from such cameras.

Video recording

Nokia C2-02 video recording isn’t anything impressive either. You can record at QCIF resolution of 15 fps which is pretty poor. In fact, it is one of the worse video recording qualities. The recorded content is suitable just for MMSes and nothing else.

Browser

Nokia C2-02 comes with a really new cool browser. The start screen has the standard URL and search bards and below this, you get 3 side scrollable panels which will remind of you of Symbian homescreen. One feature I really liked was autosuggestions – you get the list of recently visited sites when you start typing URLs and they are filtered as you type stuff. Performance of the browser isn’t perfect and I had some error problems here too. There is Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 onboard but this phone doesn’t support Flash. For watching any YouTube stuff, you will need to go to the Website’s mobile version. The absence of Flash isn’t a big deal looking at the hardware specs and the small screen.

I will recommend you to get the latest version of Opera Mini 6.1 for surfing the Web. It has goodies like tabbed browsing and on-screen QWERTY keyboard for text inputs.

Social networking

Nokia C2-02 comes with Communities app and this is where all the SNS (Social Networking Services) are located. You get both Twitter and Facebook support and each type can handle several different accounts. Flickr support too is available. Facebook section has support for different communication capabilities.

Games

Nokia C2-02 comes with 6 games pre-installed inside – Memorize, Golf Tour, Music Guess, Picture Puzzle, Solitaire, and Nature Park.

Conclusion

Nokia C2-02 looks pretty good; it does everything that a basic handset is supports to do – make phone calls, send text and keep things simple. If you are looking for an entry-level phone like this, then I would certainly recommend you to go for it. But if you use features like Web browser extensively, then this phone is not for you.

Specifications

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