Nokia C2-03 – Dual SIM Touch and Type Phone:
So Nokia has managed to launch some dual SIM handsets in the C series and Nokia C2-03 is a touch and type, dual SIM device with Easy Swap for the second SIM.
Nokia C2-03: Design & Build
The Nokia C2-03 is a slider phone with a touchscreen. It has a metallic finish with a little gloss at the bottom of the phone which is a fingerprint magnet but let me assure you that the body is all plastic. The front of the device houses a 2.6″ resistive TFT screen and just has the call and disconnect buttons below the display, with the disconnect button doubling up as the switch on/off button.
Nokia C2-03: Dual SIM
When you switch on the phone, we observed that it takes a little longer to boot up than other low end Nokia devices in its league. And being a dual SIM device, that is the first thing we decided to put to the test. The Easy Swap on the C2-03 work really well and the phone reads the new SIM pretty quickly and its ready to use within a few seconds.
Though, interestingly the C2-03 does not read the secondary card without the primary being inserted in the battery i.e. the SIM2 will not function if SIM1 is not inserted in the phone. You would also be fairly disappointed to know that the C2-03 only functions as a dual SIM only in standby and once you are on a call on any one of the SIM the other automatically gets deactivated and when dialed shows unavailable till the duration of the call. It seems Nokia still doesn’t have a dual SIM phone in which both the SIM’s function together.
Nokia C2-03: Touch & Type
Coming to the touch and type functionality on the device it reminds us of the Nokia E6. And similarly here also you cannot control the phone wholly using the keypad only as the options and exit buttons are placed on the touch screen thus forcing you to use the touch often. There are other small things like the lack of function to forward music by just dragging the timeline. Instead you can only use the the forward / rewind touch buttons on the screen to skip thus making touch almost redundant here. Overall the touchscreen feels a little sluggish and unresponsive a lot more times which is quite obvious as it is a resistive screen.
Nokia C2-03: Camera & Video
The C2-03 has a 2MP camera with no auto-focus. We found the performance of the camera pretty average and coupled with the image editor it is pretty decent for a low budget phone. Though I must add that the gallery is a little slow in indexing and the images show up in the gallery after OS refreshes itself with a slight delay.
The video camera is a basic one and the output quality of the videos left us far from impressed. The videos are too pixellated to our liking, also the sharpness and saturation of colors was very low. You will definitely not find yourself taking a lot of videos from this phone.
Nokia C2-03: Multimedia
The speaker on the back of the device is surprisingly quite loud much like the other low end devices in the market though they perform slightly better as the sound is clear even at high volumes though I must add that you might feel that the speaker is spitting blaring music at you. The earphones bundled with the device are usual standard ones which are average.
Conclusion:
Though the phone has an attractive design and a solid finish its Dual SIM Easy Swap functionality remains the strongest selling point. Also the fact, that you cannot control the device only using the keyboard also might put off some of you and using both the touch and type to control the device might take a little getting used to and you might find yourself wishing that the C2-03 had a five way D-pad.
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