Nokia C2-02 review: A simple touch

Music player could have been better

The music player of the Nokia C2-02 practically hasn’t seen any changes except getting touch support. Still, it offers decent looks and a solid set of features, including album art, and a fair number of supported formats.

Songs can be filtered by artist, album and genre. The player handles AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, WMA, AMR-NB. Naturally the A2DP profile is supported, allowing the use of stereo Bluetooth earphones.

Unfortunately, there are some annoying limitations - for example, hitting the red receiver key turns off the music player and goes to the homescreen. The player can work in the background, but you have to go to Options > Play in background for that.

Also, when not in the Now playing interface, there is no way to pause a song or skip to the next one, not even with the homescreen widget. You have to get into the music player to do that (and it doesn’t support swipe gestures like the homescreen does, nor can you assign swipe gestures on the homescreen to things like "next track").

The music player does the job

Displaying the artist and title of the currently playing song are all that the homescreen widget does. They appear in the Radio and music area on the homescreen so they need to be enabled in the Homescreen mode settings for the info to be displayed.

There's no equalizer and the whole music player interface is quite laggy. The overall impression is that Nokia could have done better (and have done so before).

FM radio with RDS

An alternative to your music library in the C2-02 is the FM radio. It matches the music player interface and covers all basic functions.

RDS support is available and you can make the handset search and save all available stations in your area. RDS info and frequency appear on the homescreen, much like with the music player.

The FM radio interface

The FM radio can also record broadcasts but that feature is regional.

Good audio quality

The Nokia C2-02 audio output isn't by any means spectacular, but it's probably more than you can expect, given the price tag. Actually it's almost identical to what the C2-00 had to offer with the minor differences certain to go unnoticed in real life scenarios.

The phones does pretty well when connected to an external amplifier (such as your home or car stereo) and it's among the loudest devices we have seen (or rather recorded).

When you plug in a pair of headphones there's notable increase in intermodulation distrotion and stereo crosstalk, while the volume levels drop rapidly. However, you are still left with a decent output so in general we can say we are pretty pleased with the C2-02.

Check out the table and see for yourself.

Nokia C2-02 frequency response graph

You can find more info about the testing process here.

Video player handles MP4/3GP only

When we tested the first batch of touch-enabled S40 Nokias, their video player surprised us with its capabilities - it played XviD reasonably well.

But the Nokia C2-02 can't. In fact, the only things we got to play were QVGA videos in MP4 or 3GP format. That's it - higher-res videos wouldn’t play, and neither did XviD videos.

The controls of the player are rather simple - you get a play/pause button along with previous and next buttons and also a full screen option.

The Nokia C2-02 hardly suited for watching video clips