Nokia C3-01 Touch and type, mobile phone silver sim-free, unbranded

I upgraded to the C3 Touch and Type from my much loved Nokia 6500 slide (which sadly died a few months short of my contract renewal, leaving me on an black-and-white for the interim). So I rate the phone largely based on comparisons with that one, but hopefully it's generic enough for people not familiar with the 6500-s.Apart from being a "candy bar" style phone instead of a slide phone, and a bit longer/thinner, the main differences are:- A touch-screen: this is quite nice to use, and scrolling and tapping gestures seem quite intuitive and responsive. Doing a tap-and-hold often brings up an additional "right-click" context menu. Limited by the screen's size, a little fiddly for precision work, such as positioning the text cursor or clicking links and can involve some trial and error, but not too frustrating.What is a bit of a drawback though, is that the touchscreen is now the only way of performing many actions, because the old interface of dpad/central button, and left/right soft-buttons is completely missing, so there's no physical fallback. For texting this can be weird because you occasionally have to switch from the keypad to the touchscreen to do things like move the cursor or delete characters. But what's worse is that the buttons' absence makes some Java apps are harder to use, or completely unusable. The touchscreen is nice, but given a choice, I'd probably have preferred just the buttons to just the touchscreen.- Wifi connectivity: this theoretically means I can browse the Internet for free at home. In practice though, connectivity can be a little temperamental. I often find myself resorting to the 3G connection instead, where it often has more success. On occasion it struggles to work with that as well though, although this is the first phone I've really tried to use the Internet with, so I don't know how typical that is.(On balance, with 500MB/Mo free on my contract, I probably could take or leave the Wifi. The browsing experience on the phone is OK, but I'm not likely to use that much in a month. Monitoring my Orange contract online, I seem to have used only a few megabytes in the first half of the month.)Note: I would caution that leaving the WiFi on does seem to reduce the battery life significantly.Anyway, those are probably the phones two "killer features" over the average button phone. Here's a look at some more miscellaneous features (again, some points may be rather specific relating to the 6500s, but hopefully general enough to give you a feel for it).- A lock button on the side, which has the advantage of resuming with wherever you left off, so you could lock it and put it in your pocket in the middle of a text message composition or browser session, and carry on later.- USB charging (as opposed to just connectivity). This means you're no longer dependent on a more bulky mains charger, although that said, it comes with a nice slimline charger that's smaller than most - its height is reducible by having the middle pin niftily push down when not plugged in.(Slightly strangely, although it can charge from a USB cable, it still has an older-style thin-pin hole for the mains charger.)- A 5.0 Megapixel camera (instead of 3.2 in the 6500s). In practice this means pictures are 2592*1944 instead of 2048*1536, which is a slight improvement (though both are bigger significantly greater than my desktop resolution). I was hoping that this camera would be a straight upgrade, but I was disappointed when I realised it no longer has auto-focus (the 6500s had a Carl Zeiss lens), which means I can no longer use it for macro shots.- A torch:) holding the '*' button switches on/off the camera flash LED, which could be useful.- A 3.5" Audio jack (instead of 2.5"). Potentially useful since I can use my own headphones with it (the supplied ones don't look great), but I don't plan on using it much.- An accurate countdown timer(!) - my 6500s seemed to have a "drift" of about 5% for some reason.- The clipboard seems to be gone, so I can't cut/paste text in notes, etc. I minor irritation though - in practice I haven't found myself missing it much.- The shortcut menu button has gone. On my old phone I had a customisable menu of shortcuts assigned to the left soft-button, and some attached to the dpad. Now I can get up to four touch-shortcuts on the homescreen, plus some specific ones attached to widgets (such as alarm/calendar respectively for the time/date widget), plus two on the touch buttons at the bottom of the screen. This is almost as good, and in some ways better, but a shortcut menu, with a list of as many as I wanted, would have been nice.- On receiving the phone, it seems Nokia (or perhaps Orange) no longer provide a USB data cable or MicroSD card for extensible storage. Not too bad for me though, since I could provide both of these from my old phone.- Occasionally, it seems to crash or something, the screen flashes, and it does a soft reset. Slightly worrying, but so far it doesn't seem to have happened at any infuriating moments.Overall, it's a pretty good phone. And if my last phone hadn't been so good I probably would give it 4 or 5 stars. But considering it's supposed to be an upgrade from a phone that was two years older, I'm going down to 3.

I'd been looking for a new phone for many months. Wanted something not too big, robust enough to stand up to being carried around in a girl sized pocket or handbag. Wanted to be able to access internet and e-amil if needed, but important to be easy to use. Looked at i-phones and HTC but felt that the risk of me cracking the screen was big. Blackberry, especially the Pearl, went to top of my list, but then saw the Nokia C3-01 touch and type.This phone is gorgeous - beautifully made, small enough to stay in my pocket without risk of damage. So, got it yesterday in a lovely gunmetal grey finish. Everything just works - no complications to set-up. Quick to set-up access to internet through wi-fi and 3g. Easy to set-up e-mail accounts and they work without any fuss at all.The camera works well. The radio is the only let-down - so far, it's only managed to find one station. However, I can't see me using the radio much anyway.All in all, I am delighted with this phone. It was free on my very modest contract with Orange, came with a £25 department store voucher and, as a loyal customer, I got a 10% line-rental discount. I'd have bought the phone without the freebies as I really loved the design and build quality. Having lived with it for 24 hours, made and received calls, sent and read texts, surfed the net and dealt with a few e-mails, used the camera ... I have no complaints at all.

touch screen worked well for a while until it started going berzerk.

Reading some of the other reviews I wonder if I have a faulty phone or faulty fingers! My trusty 3600 slide died and I picked this from a limited range as a free replacement. I picked the touch screen option as I use my ipod for e mails and internet quite a lot and have found the touch screen option great.Not this one though - it is so cumbersome to scroll up and down, and when trying to get the darn rolling list to stop rolling most times I end up accidently activating the wrong thing. If only there were navigation arrows this would be a good phone!There are a couple of annoying issues - I can't see any way to put a bluetooth shortcut on the homescreen, which means when I get in the car I have to factor in an extra 5 minutes to get to the rolling menu - remember the playground chant - 'where she stops nobody knows'? The other thing I don't like is that the little flashy light to tell you that you've missed a call or text is so tiny you don't notice it unless you really look. I also can't seem to get the flash to work on the camera, despite looking at the instruction book - maybe that's just me though.On a positive note the keypad is very responsive and the phone is thin and light enough to fit in my pocket.Sorry Nokia - nice try to add the 21st century to an ordinary phone but I would stay with the much loved format that has done to proud for many years rather than dip one toe in the water and make an iffy hybridSo now to think of what phone to get when my contract's up in a few months.....

I prefer the old method of text messaging. I do not like the qwerty keyboards for texting. I chose this phone and am pleased with it. It takes a while to get used to the scrolling touch method but I found if I used the stylus from my son's Nintendo DS, this was a great help! However, after a weeks use, I am now used to the touch method. The camera is OK. I have also purchased the gel skin for this phone and would recommend it as the Nokia is very slim and once the skin is on, it is a bit sturdier and easier to grip and hold the phone.