Nokia C7 Preview

Full Review

Nokia C7 was launched yesterday along with three other smartphones - the Nokia C6-01, the E7 and the N8 at Nokia World. The C7 is the biggest touchscreen smartphone in the new Nokia C-series.  It is a slim touchscreen phone encased in a polished stainless steel body. Lets look at what the Nokia C7 has to offer to compete in the smartphone race.

Form Factor
The Nokia C7 is a slim touchscreen phone that has a polished stainless steel body and its front is covered with a glass material. Weighing 130g and sporting a body with 117.3 x 56.8 x 10.5 mm dimensions, the C7 won't disappoint in terms of portability.

Screen
Offering the same screen size as the iPhone, the Nokia C7 has a 3.5-inch capacitive screen but with a much lower resolution (360 x 640 pixels) than the iPhone 4's retina display. In terms of resolution, the nHD ( 360 x 640 pixels) on the C7 is not groundbreaking while today's higher-end touchscreen phones are packing at least WVGA ( 800 x 480 pixels). However, Nokia does offer AMOLED screens on all the new smartphones that were announced at Nokia World 2010 yesterday, which we think is what they should have done a long long time back like they did for the Nokia N85.

OS and Interface
The Symbian^3 did not make any major overhaul in terms of looks but fixing many of the bugs on the Symbian OS with S60 interface 5th Edition. Its design and features may not win most Android and iPhone users, but the Nokia users will have now options to have more than one Home screen, gesture support, faster UI and many more tweaks and inclusions to make the OS more adept for touchscreen phones.

Memory
The phone has an internal memory of 8GB and supports up to 32GB of microSD card.

Multimedia
The Nokia C7 is as jam-packed as the Nokia N8 in terms of multimedia except for the missing HDMI-out. Audio playback support includes MP3, WMA, AAC, AMR and WAV. While there is no mention of playback for XviD and DivX video, C7 will play you MP4 and WMV files willingly. For connecting it to your favorite headphones, there is a 3.5mm jack.

Camera
Once again, the Nokia C7 leaves the 5 mega pixel race behind and offers the 8 mega pixel. It is the second 8MP camera from Nokia after the N86. The camera is expected to have auto focus and the spec reports that it has dual LED flash as well. Apart from the mega pixel count, the most outstanding feature is the 720p HD video recording at 25fps.

Connectivity
Nokia always takes good care of the connectivity part for its smartphones and the C7 is not forgotten here either. It has Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP, 3G with HSDPA, Wi-Fi and USB On-the-go ( to let you plug in low-powered USB devices like pen drive). For audio, there is a 3.5mm audio jack while video as mentioned before can be streamed via the composite-out to a TV.

App Support
Despite frequent updates in the Ovi store, the quality of apps available in the store is surely not in par with the iPhone app store, however, if these new phones from Nokia live up to expectation, we expect to see more developers to create as good apps as they are doing for the iPhone App Store.

More Interesting Reads on Nokia phones

Nokia N8, the best camera phone ever?

Nokia launches C6-01, C7 and E7 at Nokia World

Bottom Line

Looks like Nokia C7 will be one of the most feature-rich mainstream touchscreen phone and it has excellent hardware. If only the Symbian^3 offers a cut-above-the-rest user-experience, then Nokia C7 will sell like hot cakes. We expect the product to hit Indian shore soon and then we'll know how good the phone is.