Mobile News

Nokia C7 was announced by Nokia at this year Nokia World event held in September. To be completely honest it did not grab our attention back then. A monoblok phone with a quite large touchscreen, nothing we haven't see so far. At least at pictures C7 did not look like something extraordinary. And it's not. I mean extraordinary. But definitely this is one of the prettiest Nokia's phones we've seen lately.

The Beauty

If you prefer a thin body smartphone with as large screen as is the phone itself, may be this can be your choice too. It is 10.5 mm thin with a stainless steel body and a 3.5 inch AMOLED display with glass window. The front surface is without much surplus keys, on the right you have some to control the media and the ever needed Lock button. C7 has rounded edges, so feel when you hold the phone in your hand is for a really smooth and comfortable to use device. And while we are looking just on the outside let me mention that there are three colors this smartphone will be available in - Charcoal black, Frosty metal, Mahogany brown. And the last one is very recommended from us to all of you that love to run out of the trivial.

The screen is covered with glass window and this even is not itt best quality. It's a capacitive touchscreen, one of the best we saw in Nokia lately, with a very quick respond and tactile feedback. The resolution is 360х640 pixels, 3.5" in diagonal - super bright and visible even in the sunlight. Still, C7 does not belong to the ClearBlack blessed models like Nokia E7 and C6-01, so we expect even more from the future Nokia's touchscreen.

The Beast

The beauty outside and on the surface, so let's see if there's a beast inside this Nokia and is it worth its preliminary announced price of EUR 335. This model was announced as a social networking smartphone, so we are not going to expect miracles from it, bu still... It has a good multimedia base featuring an 8 megapixel camera with dual led flash МР and HD video recording - encoding 25 fps, decoding 30 fps. First, keep in mind this is not the headliner N8 and actually has some gaps in camera quality. This is based on the fact that C7 uses fixed focus and not autofocus, so you may say farewell to the Macro shots. Still, landscapes and portraits are good enough and also you have a bunch of additional features like Face Detection to improve the pics. The video is with good quality and even the sound is without too much background noise.

But where you can see the changes from Symbian^3? Ok, first let's say that Nokia themselves confirm that there are not such great differences between the interface of S60 5^th Edition and Symbian^3 and their point seem reasonable. Nokia does not intend to stress its users with a completely new interface and prefer little steps. So, you gonna see the little steps in C7 in the brand new look of how your music is arranged. Only with a touch of your finger you can scroll with all the albums, songs or Artists stored in the 8GB of your internal memory. If you need more you can extend it with up to 32 GB microSD. The Nokia C7 offers also a FM radio and FM transmitter, so you can wirelessly stream your favorite music to your audio system or in the car by simoly using Bluetooth 3.0 (super fast) connection. If you need to make it more personal there is a 3.5 mm audio jack.

The Nokia C7 connectivity features 3G, HSDPA cat 9 up to 10.2 Mbps, HSUPA cat 5 up to 2.0 Mbps and of course Wi-Fi. The communications include also Micro-USB connector and charging, USB On-the-Go and TV out.

But is Nokia C7 really a beast in some way? It is equipped with 256 МВ RAM and a 680 MHz processor and though it's a little bit far from all the recent devices with up to 1GHz CPU, C7 works as fast as you need it and all the Apps run smooth. Still, Ovi Store is a little bit far from the offers you may find in Android Market or Apple App Store, but it is catching up fast and it has already achieved 3 million downloads per day. Here, with the new Symbian^3 the Ovi interface and the integration of Ovi Store is quite better.

The navigation here is Ovi Maps and do not be surprised when the GPS detects you for less than 10 seconds even indoor. All new Nokias can do that and it's totally great. C7 also supports Nokia Messaging and keep track of new email from your Yahoo! or Gmail accounts directly on the homescreen and is totally integrated with Facebook and Twitter. The line continues with Web TV, Office document viewers, Video and photo editor. All you may need further you will find in Ovi Store, like Swype, AccuWeather, Shazam, Angry Birds, etc.

So, Nokia C7 may not be the beast you expect, but it has and impressive shape and body and a very well measured features that behave better than expected. For the previously announced price of that Symbian^3 smartphone we may say only that it's really worth it. However, if you have other impressions and comments, please do not hesitate to leave them on the wall here.