Nokia X3 Touch and Type (Nokia X3-02)

Available now
17th August 2010

The Nokia X3 Touch and Type (or Nokia X3-02) is a midrange "candy bar" phone with the very unusual addition of a small touchscreen.

Pitched to sell at about €125 before tax and subsidy, the X3 Touch and Type offers a very respectable number of features for the money. On the back is a 5 megapixel camera with QVGA video capture at 20 frames per second. The X3 Touch and Type is a 3.5G phone supporting HSPA high-speed data and also WiFi, plus a multimedia player and FM radio. The 2.4" 240 x 320 pixel display is about standard for a monoblock phone like this, but the inclusion of a touchscreen certainly does make it interesting.

At first glance, the X3-02 looks perfectly normal.. but then you might notice the unusual arrangement of the keypad. This four-column arrangement moves the star, hash and zero keys over to the right hand side.. but we're really not sure what Nokia are trying to achieve with this.

The touchscreen is a basic resistive panel, Nokia are expecting customers to use a mix of the keypad and touchscreen depending on what they are doing. Of course, quite a lot of Nokia devices now have touchscreens, but this is much smaller than the rest.

This is a very lightweight phone at 78 grams and measuring 104 x 48 x 9.6mm. Talktime on 3G is quoted as 3.5 hours, or 5 hours on GSM. Available colours are White Silver, Dark Metal, Petrol Blue, Pink and Lilac.

Other applications include an email client, a "Communities" client that allows access to Facebook and Twitter, Instant Messaging and access to the Ovi Store. But one other very surprising feature about the X3 Touch and Type is that this isn't a smartphone, instead it runs a touch-enabled version of the simple but familiar Series 40 operating system, not a million miles away from last year's Nokia 6208c in concept.

It's quite clever to get Series 40 to do these things, but putting this level of development into a platform that Nokia themselves want to replace with Symbian seems like waste of effort.. even if we do rather like the idea of the X3 Touch and Type.

The market isn't exactly crying out for midrange candy bar phone with a small touchscreen, but that could just be that the market doesn't know that it wants one yet. Who knows.. after this all phones like this might be touchscreen phones, or perhaps this will just end up as a forgotten oddity. But it is certainly an interesting attempt to redefine the market.

Nokia say that the X3 Touch and Type should be available this quarter in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Other markets should follow.