Nokia C2-01 Review

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The Nokia C2-01 is a budget mobile phone with an attractive design. Nokia C2-01 hardly sets the pulse racing but it performed solidly in our lab tests and is a decent choice if you want a basic model.

Nokia C2-01: Design & Build

It’s a slim, light model with a black, plastic body and metal edging. This helps give it more of a premium feel than most cheap handsets. The small size means that on-screen icons can be hard to make out and that the text in ‘threaded messages’ (where the phone displays messages you’ve sent and received next to each other) is too small.

Nokia C2-01: Display

The phone has a 240x320 resolution display which measures just two inches corner to corner. This is reasonable for a phone this price but is pretty small by today's standards.

Nokia C2-01: Display

The Nokia C2-01 uses Nokia’s tried and tested Symbian S40 operating system. This is basic but at least it’s familiar and easy to set up.

Nokia C2-01: Sound

Sound quality on calls is OK in good conditions, but the Nokia C2-01 struggled when tested it with loud background noise (the sounds of a busy café). Calls to the phone sounded muffled and calls to our reference handset were garbled and hard to understand.

Nokia C2-01: Battery

The phone is equipped with a 1020mAh battery. This may be quite small compared to the 1500mAh batteries you find on top of the range smartphones, but the compact Nokia C2-01, with its two-inch screen, is far less power hungry. Recharging takes 170 minutes, which is about average. We were able to get 240 minutes of calls when we tested it on the 3G network with medium reception levels.

Nokia C2-01: Camera & Video

The Nokia C2-01 comes with a pretty standard 3.2Mp camera. In good conditions it takes reasonable-looking pictures, but our test photos taken indoors looked very yellow. And the small, reflective screen fails to show off photos to any great effect. The camera doesn’t have autofocus or a flash and few of the advanced features you find on more expensive models.

It records video but only in 176x144 resolution at just 15 frames per second. This is about as primitive a video camera as you can buy. You can play videos on the phone but the small, low resolution screen hinders the performance.

Nokia C2-01: Multimedia

The music player is disappointing. The small display means it can only display limited information and the supplied headphones are poor, offering minimal bass.

The headphones have controls built in to them which can be useful but the ones here only allow you to skip to the next track. You can connect a set of your own, if you prefer, using the 3.5mm socket though we doubt serious music lovers will choose to listen much on this basic phone.

Nokia C2-01: Memory

The Nokia C2-01 has a very small internal memory of 46MB, so you’ll be able to store only a handful of songs. You expand this using a microSD memory card though you’ll need to supply your own as the phone doesn’t come with one. An FM radio is provided if don’t want to upgrade your memory or tire of the tracks you have stored on your card.

Nokia C2-01: Internet Browsing

The Nokia C2-01 is Nokia's cheapest 3G phone and, given this, its internet browsing speed is reasonable. However, because of the small (two-inch) screen you won’t want to do this too often or for too long – it’s fine for checking train times or football scores but not for reading lots of text.

Conclusion:

The Nokia C2-01 is a simple, likeable and cheap phone. It also offers a surprising number of features that are normally absent at this price, including 3G connectivity.

Nokia C2-01 Specs & Price >