Nokia C2-01

Available now
22nd November 2010

Nokia's cheapest 3G phone to date, the Nokia C2-01 combines typically smart Nokia styling with a feature set that does seem to offer excellent value for money.

Priced to sell at just €70 before tax and carrier subsidy, the C2-01 easily breaks the magic €100 barrier for 3G phones. But at this sort of price, don't expect anything too fancy.. the specifications of the C2-01 are pretty modest compared to high end devices. It features a relatively small 2" 240 x 320 pixel display, a 3.2 megapixel camera, microSD expandable memory, Bluetooth, a media player and a 3.5mm audio socket.

The screen is a bit small for meaningful web surfing, but Nokia have added some social networking support in addition to the basic browser. Although this is only a Series 40 phone rather than a Symbian smartphone, there are a decent number of a applications available from the Ovi Store for this platform.

Nokia's 3.2 megapixel cameras are usually good enough for most purposes, but video capture is pretty miserable at just 176 x 144 pixels and 15 frames per second. Video playback is much better though, but remember that the screen size is pretty limited.

The Nokia C2-01 supports tri-band 3G connectivity, but not 3.5G.. and there's certainly no WiFi or GPS. But you wouldn't expect those sort of things from an inexpensive little 3G device like this either. Inside is a 1020 mAh BL-5C battery that is quoting as giving up to 4.5 hours talktime on 3G and over 8 hours on GSM. Standby time is about 18 days, and the whole package weighs just 89 grams and measures 110 x 47 x 15mm.

So what is the catch? Well, the Nokia C2-01 is very much like 3G phones used to be 5 years ago, in fact it is very close in specification to the old Nokia 6233. They were really fairly limited in their usefulness and 3G took a long time to take off. So it's hard to see just who will be excited about reliving 2005 again with the new C2-01, except they will be doing for less than one quarter of the price that it would have been back then.

Nokia say that the C2-01 will be available in Black, White and Warm Silver (although the press photos seem to show it in pale gold) from Q1 2011 onwards.