Nokia C7 Review

Nokia's attempt to return to the top of the smartphone pile started with the Symbian^3-touting N8, which in terms of hardware is a very impressive handset. If you're looking for something a little less pricey, though, then the more modest C7 may be right up your street. Available for around £280 SIM free or for free on £25pm contracts, most of the networks are stocking it so you've a decent number of buying choices.Just as with the N8, the C7 sees a return to form from Nokia in terms of hardware design and build quality. The main chassis is plastic but it feels solid and has a nice matt finish, while a metal backplate provides a particularly premium feel. The front is adorned with a quality glass touchscreen that, again, really makes this feel like a high-end device. We're not that keen on the silver finish – particularly the distractingly shiny sections around the screen – but the dark grey version looks particularly appealing and there's a champagne option too.

Under that backplate there is a microSD slot for adding up to 32GB of storage to the 8GB already onboard. You do, however, have to remove the battery to access it.Looking round the sides it's clear Nokia still isn't shy of having plenty of buttons. Up top you'll find a power button alongside the headphone jack and microUSB socket, while on the right is the camera shutter button, screen lock slider, volume control and voice command button. Finally, on the front below the screen are physical buttons for call, menu, and call-end. Aside from the ever awkward-to-reach screen lock slider all the buttons feel solidly planted and responsive, with just the right amount resistance.As well as the screen lock slider not being the easiest thing to operate, it's also now pointless as pressing the menu button on the front allows you to unlock the screen, while pressing the power button on the top lets you lock it. It's a small gripe but we tend to dislike having buttons that are somewhat superfluous.There's a microUSB socket for data transfer and charging but, for some reason, the supplied microUSB cable doesn't charge the phone so normal charging is done via the proprietary socket found on the left edge.

At 130g, the C7 is a fairly weighty phone but dimensions of 117.3 x 56.8 x 10.5mm mean it's not too large - and is in fact very slim. The smooth curves of its design also make it very comfortable to hold, albeit a tad slippery.One of the first things you notice about the interface is the rather neat clock display that sits there whenever the phone is out of your pocket but not in use. Because the display uses AMOLED technology, which doesn't require a backlight, the phone can get away with keeping just a few individual pixels illuminated to display a clock face and date without taking a significant hit on battery life. It's a simple thing but being able to just glance across at your phone to check the time is a very useful feature.The screen itself is excellent. At 3.5in from corner to corner, it isn't the largest one going and its resolution of 360 x 640 pixels isn't the highest either. However the combination makes for a sharp and easy to read display. Combined with the high contrast, highly saturated colours and great viewing angles of AMOLED, overall it makes for one of the best quality panels going.That said, it is a bit narrow, so once Nokia actually adds a portrait qwerty keyboard, it may be a bit cramped to use. That lower size and resolution also mean it's not the best choice if you're particularly into watching video and browsing the web.

As for the overall interface, regular readers probably won't be surprised to hear we're not overly impressed. While Nokia has addressed many of the fundamental problems with previous versions of Symbian – like the lack of inertial scrolling and some items requiring a double tap while others need a single tap – there are still plenty of ways in which it trails the likes of WebOS, Android, Bada, iOS and Windows Phone for sheer ease of use.Menu transitions, opening apps, sliding round the web browser; it all feels a bit disjointed and cumbersome. Other annoyances include the vast number of menus required (most notably in the web browser), while silly little things like the applications and settings menus defaulting to some random order (rather than alphabetical) just add to the frustration. Regarding the latter, it can be customised - as indeed you can with most of the OS - but you don't really expect to have to do quite so much just to make a phone usable.

While there are a fair number of stilted pauses when generally navigating around (usually to do with stuff taking a moment to load and Symbian not having quite such friendly loading screens as some alternatives), overall performance isn't actually an issue and you can get stuff done fairly promptly. Other phones may have much faster hardware on paper but, thanks to Symbian being a fairly economical operating system, it can get away with using much slower hardware.