Nokia C2-02 review: A simple touch

Reasonable retail package

In this price range, you can’t really hope for a mahogany box filled with gold-plated accessories. You may as well consider yourself lucky if they bundled all the basic stuff. We are reasonably pleased with what we found in the compact box.

The retail package covers the basics

You get a charger, a single-piece handsfree and a 2GB microSD card tucked into the phone itself. And while you do get adequate storage out of the box it’s rather hard to fill it up with content as there’s no microUSB cable to be found here. These shouldn't be too hard to find though.

Nokia C2-02 360-degree spin

At 103 x 51.4 x 17 mm, the Nokia C2-02 is hardly the most compact phone to sport a 2.6” screen. The keyboard, of course, needs room, but the extra thickness is mostly due to the slider form factor. It's rather chubby, the Nokia C2-02, but in a nice friendly way. The weight of 115 grams is nothing out of the ordinary.

Design and construction

The Nokia C2-02 has a simple, clean design that doesn't call attention to itself. This might not be the slimmest of handsets out there, nor does it have an expensive finish, but it still looks OK.

The rounded shape, the faux-metal at the bottom and the nice matte plastic work well in combo to give the phone a more solid, professional look than you'd expect in this class. Fingerprints are an issue on the screen and chrome-like accent at the bottom.

The front panel of the Nokia C2-02 is mostly taken by the 2.6” touchscreen LCD of QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels). The image quality is unimpressive with contrast, brightness and viewing angles all average at best.

At 153 dpi it’s hardly the sharpest thing you have seen either, but we suppose someone looking at a device like the C2-02 will gladly settle for average or just below average and that’s exactly what’s on offer here.

It's hardly the most inspiring display that you get with the C2-02

And even though it's a resistive unit, the screen is pleasingly responsive. Nokia's unmatched haptic feedback comes as a bonus: soft gentle vibrations acknowledge your input and it's always the part of the screen that's right under your thumb that vibrates.

There’s no manual brightness setting in the Nokia C2-02 and there’s no ambient light sensor either to take care of that automatically.

Below the display we find the Call and End buttons, while the earpiece is the only thing above it on the front panel. The two call keys are placed on a single thin piece of glossy plastic that's almost level with the surface around it. The buttons, big enough for comfortable press, are placed right above a subtle chin, which makes them easier to locate by touch.

The earpieice and the two call keys complete the tally on the front

Sliding up reveals 12 more keys set up in four rows of three – the standard alphanumeric layout. It's a flat keypad but thin grooves run vertically and across to set each button apart. The decent press feedback is enough to give reasonable typing speeds.

The keyboard is certainly not perfect, but it does the job

The left side of the Nokia C2-02 is completely bare. All there is at the bottom features is the microphone pinhole.

There are no controls on the left side or at the bottom

The right-hand side of the phone is busier, with the volume rocker, screen lock slider and the lanyard eyelet.

From top to bottom you get the lanyard eyelet the volume rocker and the screen lock slider

At the top you get the 3.5mm audio jack, the standard microUSB port and the 2mm Nokia charger plug. The C2-02 doesn't have USB charging enabled.

The jacks are all on top

We finish our trip at the back, where the loudspeaker grill and the 2 megapixel camera lens are located. The lens is huge, but if you are interested in cellphones enough to be reading this site, you’d certainly know better than to expect miracles from a 2 megapixel fixed-focus snapper.

The 2 megapixel camera lens and the loudspeaker grill

Removing the back cover reveals the 1020 mAh BL-5C Li-Ion battery that is said to last up to 600 hours of stand-by or up to 5 hours of talk time on a single charge. In real life we managed to get it going for almost four days, but that’s mainly because there’s not too much to do with the C2-02 besides calling.

The battery is good enough for four days of moderate usage

The microSD card slot is under the battery so hot-swapping is out of the question. The SIM compartment cover says SIM1 even though it's a single SIM handset. Obviously this peculiarity is due to the fact that the C2-02 shares this part with its C2-03 and C2-06 siblings.

Overall, the Nokia C2-02 seems pretty solid and we are confident that it will last in the long run. Parts of the finish do look prone to scratches, and you do have the fingerprint issues, but even if looks do fade with time, the handset should last.

The Nokia C2-02 feels nice to handle