Nokia C2-02 review: A simple touch

Telephony

The reception on the Nokia C2-02 was consistently good and in-call sound was crisp and clear, though not as loud as we would have liked. The lack of smart dialing was not surprising for an S40 device. There’s no voice dialing or Voice Clarity either.

Calling Dexter on Nokia C2-02

In a call, the screen is locked until you use the lock slider (there's no proximity sensor).

There are two settings on how the sliding the phone open and closed is handled - sliding it open can answer a call and sliding it closed can end it.

We carried out our traditional loudspeaker test to find out the Nokia C2-02 is a Very good performer. The strength of the vibration was good too - you're unlikely to miss calls with the C2-02. You can find more details about our test, as well as the results of all other tested handsets here.

Good messaging

The Nokia C2-02 comes with S40's standard (and quite capable) messaging department. It can handle all the common message types including SMS, MMS, as well as flash and audio messages and there’s easy email setup, too.

The keyboard on the Nokia C2-02 isn't the best we've seen and you don't get an on-screen QWERTY keyboard either.

The standard Inbox view is available but you also get Conversations view mode (that’s the threaded message feature).

Nokia C2-02 messaging app

The editor is well organized and you won’t spend too much time finding your way around. Nokia has added four new virtual controls due to the lack of D-pad – two arrow keys, letter case switch and symbols.

Of course you can tap to move the cursor wherever you want, but you’ll still need those two arrows for precise positioning. The symbol and letter case features are also available from the numpad, so there is no real need of them on the screen.

When composing the message there’s a character counter and message part counter available and when you’re done you pick the recipient from the contacts list, the recently used numbers, the call log or contact groups. You can have a favorite contact too (just one).

And of course, you can enter the number manually if it’s not on any of those lists.

The Mail app is very capable and lets you create multiple accounts on multiple networks with just your email address and password. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email accounts. The email client supports SSL.

Emails are received in the background and you can put a Mail widget on the homescreen to keep track of new emails (the widget offers practically no info on the new emails though).

The email client is pretty good

And that's not the end of the messaging capabilities on the C2-02 either - the Chat app supports Google Talk, Ovi Chat, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Chat. The tabbed UI of the OS is pleasantly thumb-friendly. We wish it had a unified list of contacts from all services though, it would have made finding the right contact easier.

There's a Chat widget for the homescreen too.

The Chat app connects to four different networks

Touchable Gallery

The Photos app on the Nokia C2-02 offers only a single viewing mode, displaying a grid of 12 pictures on the screen. You can switch to landscape mode from the menu though – it makes better use of the screen real estate when you open a photo (there are black bars in portrait mode).

The Photos app is now a proper gallery

Kinetic scrolling is available and zooming into photos (via on-screen shortcuts) is relatively quick, but the animation for both isn't particularly smooth.

There's a simple image editor too, which can crop/rotate images, add text, clipart and effects, plus adjust brightness/contrast and color.

Viewing a single photo • Editing a photo

You can organize photos into albums, view them in a timeline (they are ordered by the date they were taken) and, of course, you can start a slide show.

Timeline view • Albums

As for the regular Gallery app, it’s still here – but it’s hidden in the Applications menu. It’s quite a capable file manager, especially for a feature phone. It can manage folders and files – both one by one and in bulk.

The regular gallery