Nokia Redemption- the C7 smartphone
Just when we thought that our friends from Finland had lost the phone plot, off they go and come up with a sleek and sublime piece of consumer engineering that is the Nokia C7 smartphone.
So perhaps there is some kick left in the Old Girl yet- and no I am not talking about my wife here (sorry honey:-).
The C7 smartphone shows that Nokia really does want stay in the handset space, despite what has been written by the likes of journalists as myself. From the moment you take it out of the box, you realize that the C7 was made for business use- or should I say appeal to a business clientele. It feels light (at 130 gms) and almost malleable in your hands—even though it is made of aluminium and plastic.
The 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen is where all the action takes place- and even though this too is a Symbian device, the action from screen to screen and app to app is quite smooth. There is also the issue of the 8-megapixel camera.
Now I am a firm believer in using a real camera for taking pics and a phone for communicating so you may want to excuse me when I say ‘yawn’ when it comes to phone cameras. However, the C7’s camera is OK—and I do mean OK—not so great that you will want to bring it up at your next dinner party, but better than the cameras a lot of other smartphones deploy.
The setup is easy and syncing your email accounts along with social media bits and bobs is certainly not a hard task for the C7. The C7 uses an ARM 11 680MHz processor as well as a 3D graphics accelerator chip, meaning for phoning, texting, emailing and the occasional picture snapping, the C7 is a top piece of engineering Battery life was very good too- as someone who would be classed as a medium to heavy user, I managed to get a respectable 3 full days out of the handset.
However let me say that this will vary greatly with the user- these days with the sheer volume of media and other digital data we are persuaded to stick on our mobile devices that figure should only be used as a guide.
For those that use their smartphones for document sending and manipulating, the C7 supports WORD and PDF formats as well as having an internal storage space of about 350 Mb—not huge but certainly workable. Now one word of warning- not about the phone itself but with how you set it up. If you are like me and have a microSIM card, whatever you do, don’t put it into the C7’s SIM slot.
Why you ask? Well, if you do, you will actually destroy the phone. Sure it will (probably) still work but if you ever want to take that SIM out, you will have a snowball’s chance in hell of extracting it out of the SIM card slot. This is what I managed to achieve—and it is a timely message to keep one’s eyes open for the plethora of hardware standards that coexist today.
Other than that, the Nokia C7 is a solid and well-thought out device- one that should rightly give Nokia a boost in the business smartphone space.
Pros: light, sleek and responsive
Cons: average camera and no support for microSIM standards
Rating: 3 /5
