Nokia C2-01 review: A little something

Music Player is great for the low end

The music player of the Nokia C2-01 has decent looks and a solid set of features including a fair number of formats supported.

The music player • Sorting by artist

The music player can be accessed from either the media menu or the gallery, and you can add it as an Active standby shortcut on the Homescreen too.

Tracks can be filtered by artist, album and genre. The player handles MP3, WMA, WAV and eAAC+. Naturally, the A2DP profile is supported, allowing Bluetooth streaming of stereo sound.

Music player interface • Music player options

As usual, the artist and title of the currently playing song are shown on the homescreen. They appear in the Radio and Media tile on the homescreen – it has to be enabled in the Homescreen mode settings.

The music player has several equalizer presets and two slots for users to configure. The loudspeaker of the C2-01 is quite strong.

The equalizer presets • Creating your own preset

Radio Player is standard too

There’s an FM radio on the Nokia C2-01 too. It has the standard S40 6th edition interface, which is very easy to use. RDS support is enabled. All you need to do is plug in your headphones and you’re good to go.

FM Radio interface • Options • The Radio has RDS

You can manually tune in to a station or let the Nokia C2-01 do an auto scan.

Video player is practically useless

Let’s face it, watching a movie on this small low-res display is not exactly our idea of fun.

The Video player menu • Viewing a clip in portrait and in landscape

For the record though the Nokia C2-01 supports MP4, H.264, H.263 and 3GP. The lack of DivX or XviD support isn’t a surprise.

Playing an occasional clip someone sent you via MMS is as much use as this player might be getting.

Videos can be play in fullscreen mode, and you get play and skip buttons.

Disappointing audio quality

Unfortunately, the Nokia C2-01 output was pretty disappointing. We've used to seeing flawless output from every Nokia handset we have tested recently so this came as a pretty big surprise to us.

Now the C2-01 is actually excellent (and almost as loud as it gets) when connected to an external amplifier (such as your home or car stereo). If that is how you plan to use it disregard the first paragraph.

However when you plug in a pair of headphones the degradation is so severe that you are left with mediocre output. The intermodulation distortion skyrockets and the frequency response deteriorates significantly. Then there's the usual increase in stereo crosstalk and this time it's garnished with lower dynamic range. We suppose that most of the C2-01 users will end up listening to music on headphones so you can understand why we are disappointed with the overall results.

Check out the table and see for yourself.

Nokia C2-01 frequency response graph

You can find more info about the testing process here.