Nokia recently launched their first Symbian ^3 phone, the N8, and although a lot of people would disagree with us, we think it is a damn good phone and the best Nokia has made so far. Now they have launched the second Symbian ^3 phone in the market, the Nokia C7. Unlike the N8 the C7 does not have a 12 megapixel camera to boast of or an HDMI output, but it does retain everything else in a slimmer, sexier design while having a price tag that is considerably lower than the N8. Let's see if it manages to impress us the way the N8 did.
Bundle
The C7's biggest party trick is its design and it pulls it off spectacularly every time. We were never really pleased with the designs of Nokia phones in the past, except for a few notable exceptions, such as the 88xx series phones and the original 7610, but the designs of their high-end phones have improved dramatically. The C7 looks as if the words "suave" and "svelte" were invented just to define its design. And if by looking at the pictures you think we are exaggerating you really need to see it for yourself.
The phone doesn't just look good. Pick one up and you will tend to like it even more. The phone feels incredibly solid and at the same time it's very thin as well. Much of the way the phone looks and feels is down to the materials it uses. Most of the front is the Gorilla glass, which has a mirror-like finish, especially around the edges of the screen. The front edges are made of solid metal, which curve gracefully. The sides and some portion of the back are made of plastic. The battery cover once again is made of metal, which happens to be stainless steel.
The phone is sold in three color options. We received the black color version, which we think is the best of the lot, but you also get the silver and bronze versions, the latter having a slight red tint to it.
On the front of the phone you will find the video call camera, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor above the display next to the earpiece. Below the display are the controls, the middle one being for menu and the other two for receiving and ending calls. The N8 had the former placed too far down and lacked either of the latter buttons. While we appreciate that the menu button has been moved to a more convenient location and made nicer to use, we don't understand what was the need to have the call and end keys, as their function is clearly performed by the on-screen buttons when you receive a call. The only advantage we can think of this arrangement is that you have quick access to the last called number, thanks to the call button.
On the right side of the phone are the volume control buttons near the top with the voice recording key in the middle. It is strange to see this key on a non-Eseries Nokia phone. In the middle is the sliding lock key and a bit too far below is the camera shutter button. On the left side of the phone is the charger port.
On the top of the phone is the micro USB port under a flap and a small LED that turns on when the phone is charging. The C7 supports charging over USB. In the middle is the 3.5mm headphone jack and on the right is the power button.
On the back you will notice the 8 megapixel camera lens with dual LED flash. You will also see two grilles above and below the lens. However, only the one above has the loudspeaker underneath, while the one below is a dummy for design congruence. Open the battery cover and you can see that the SIM can be accessed without removing the battery. However, for some strange reason, the microSD card cannot be accessed until you remove the battery.
Display
The Nokia C7 has a 3.5-inch 640 x 360 resolution AMOLED display capable of outputting 16 million colors. The display is protected by a highly scratch resistant Gorilla glass. And when they say scratch resistant, they mean scratch resistant. We rubbed keys, screws and whatever sharp object we could find, but nothing could put even a hairline scratch on the C7's display. You can put the C7 in a pocket or bag full of keys and it would come out unscathed.
The picture quality of the display is excellent. Indoors the display put up some vibrant colors with crisp details and deep blacks, typical of AMOLED displays. The good thing about the C7's AMOLED display is that, unlike the one on Samsung phones, they aren't tuned to display outrageously vivid colors. Instead, images look attractive yet natural, just the way we like them.
Being an AMOLED display we were worried about the display's visibility under the sun, but it absolutely shocked us in that aspect. Nokia's AMOLED display can match the best Super AMOLED display that Samsung has to offer in terms of legibility under sunlight. It was hard to believe that it was an AMOLED display; it's that good. It's actually better than some LCDs under the sun, including many of Nokia's own.
Software and Applications
The Nokia C7 is the second phone to run on the Symbian ^3 platform after the N8. We have already covered the OS in detail in our dedicated Symbian^3 review. All we have to say is that, even though it is highly improved over its predecessor, it still cannot match other operating systems such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.
It doesn't feel particularly modern and lacks finesse, and although it works well, at the end of the day when the job's done you wish it could have been done better.
The number of applications as of now is limited, and although there is a decent number of them to start off with, you don't have too many to choose from right now, especially when it comes to games. In the end, I wouldn't say the software on the C7 is a complete disappointment, but there is still some room for improvement.
Connectivity
The N8 had the most comprehensive list of connectivity features that we have seen on any device and the C7 retains every one of them. First of all, it is a quad band GSM 2G and quint band GSM 3G handset, just like the N8. This gives the C7 the ability work in almost every country in the world. Then it has Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS and USB On-the-Go connectivity. Unfortunately, unlike the N8, the C7 does not come with an adaptor for plugging in your flash drives into the phone and you may have to purchase that separately.
The call quality and network reception both were excellent on the C7. The loudspeaker was pretty loud, so ringtones were heard loud and clear. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS performance too was extremely satisfactory. As far as USB transfer speeds are concerned, the C7 is one of the faster devices we have tested.
Messaging on the C7 has seen an improvement over the N8. This is because of the Swype keyboard that is not available for the C7 on the Ovi Store. Surprisingly, C7 is the only Symbian ^3 device that has got Swype available for it. Unfortunately though, Swype is only available in landscape mode, which kind of defeats the purpose of having it. Swype is most useful when used in portrait mode when you can just use your thumb to input text. In landscape mode, it is inconvenient to hold the phone with one hand while swiping your finger on the other hand. Still, it is better than using either of the default keyboards available in Symbian. We hope that portrait QWERTY keyboard that is rumored to arrive on Symbian comes soon or at least Swype finds a way to make theirs work in portrait.
Multimedia
The Nokia C7 has an 8 megapixel camera. When we first heard the specs of the phone we were quite impressed by it. But it was only later that we realized that the camera has a fixed focus mechanism. Why would Nokia choose to play such a cruel trick on people is beyond us. The C7 does not even use the Carl Zeiss optics that high-end Nokia phones are usually equipped with. It is just a standard camera with a very impressive resolution. But as you may know by now, resolution itself does not guarantee quality. In fact, the C7 camera is the perfect example of this.
Now don't get us wrong. The C7's camera is not terrible by any stretch of imagination. But it is not what we would expect from a high-end Nokia phone, not after what we have seen what they did with the N8. Of course we did not expect that level of quality, but the C7 does not even come close to matching it is what we found most depressing. Having said that, for someone who doesn't know what the N8 camera does or is interested in photography in general wouldn't mind the C7's image quality at all.
The main issues we had with the camera, apart from the lack of focusing of course, is poor details despite the high resolution. The noise reducing algorithm is too strict, which ends up softening all the details in the image. In order to compensate for that, the post processing algorithm makes the image excessively sharp to give the illusion of enhanced details. The resultant images are unpleasant to look at when viewed at 100% zoom level.
At the same time though, thanks to the high resolution, when you are not viewing the images at 100% zoom they actually look pretty decent. However, they look their best when you are viewing them on the phone's excellent display. In fact you would never know that the camera has any issues at all if you always look at the images on the phone's display, which does a brilliant job of hiding the camera's flaws. Even images taken a couple of feet away from the subject, which otherwise would look clearly out of focus on a computer screen, look sharp on the phone's display.
The best results are found when shooting during the day but even low light images are pretty usable, especially if all you do with them is upload them on Facebook. The flash on the phone is a bit of a problem, because the range in which it is effective also happens to be the range where the focusing is a problem. So if the image is well lit, chances are it would be out of focus. But like I said before, if you are just going to view them on the phone's display then you might as well take them from a closer distance.
One good thing about the camera is that it is fast. The startup time is quick and even the shot to shot time is pretty low. This despite the fact that the phone churns out 8 megapixel images that are large in file size. The lack of auto focus also means that you can quickly take a snap without having to wait for the camera to focus. Although this does come at the cost of quality loss, but for those who are unaware of auto focus (and believe me there are plenty of them) will find that the C7 is faster than most phones out there with auto focus.
The C7 also records 720p videos. The video quality was on par with that of the N8. Outdoors as well as indoor videos came out well and looked especially good on the phone's display. Too bad it does not come with an HDMI output to view them on your TV.
Moving on, the music player on the C7 has seen some improvements since S60. The format support is still the same though and we would have liked to see support for lossless formats such as FLAC. It has a coverflow like album browser that also works in portrait mode with the track titles displayed below. The manual equalizer has been removed but you now get twenty stops on the volume scale compared to the previous ten.
The audio quality on the C7 is fabulous and the phone can go really loud as well. Unfortunately, the quality of earphones shipped with the phone is rather mediocre, which shouldn't be the case with such an expensive phone and is unbecoming of Nokia. The loudspeaker on the C7 is also fairly loud for a single speaker, but it doesn't really sound that great.
Video playback on the C7 is pretty good and much improved over older S60 phones. It can now play AVI and MKV formats with DivX and Xvid codecs in 720p resolution. However, the playback was a bit unreliable. At times a file would refuse to play and in some cases it would play, but there would be no sound. This usually happened with HD files, while SD files played with almost no trouble at all.
The image viewer on the C7 is pretty good. It supports pinch to zoom but we actually preferred to use the slider on the side as it was easier. The image gallery is pretty fast with the images and even high resolution images open up quickly. Much of the credit goes to the dedicated GPU the phone has, which enables swift processing of all graphics on the device.
The C7 also comes with a very comprehensive image and video editor on board. In fact the image editor has the most number of features that we have ever seen on a mobile phone before. The video editor is pretty good too and lets you create videos or slideshows using your videos and images as well as the music stored on the device.
The phone also has an FM radio and more importantly an FM transmitter. Nokia seems to be the only manufacturer that has bothered to include it in their devices, which is sad, as this feature is really convenient.
Battery Life
The Nokia C7 has the same 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery as the N8, but in this case it is user replaceable. With heavy usage, which consisted of several calls, messages, video playback, audio playback, video streaming, web browsing over Wi-Fi, GPS usage, camera usage with flash and video recording, the phone gave us one full day of battery life. That is very impressive and had we not used the phone so much we could have easily eked out at least two days out of the battery. Do keep in mind though that we tested the phone on a 2G network, as we usually do here. With 3G the battery life will go down further.
Competition
The Nokia C7 is priced on par with the Samsung Wave 2 and the two phones have a lot of similarities, which is where the confusion arises. Which one would you choose if you are in the market to buy a phone in that price range?
Now we are yet to review the Wave 2 but we have reviewed the original Wave and have a fair idea how the new phone is going to be. When we put both the phones head to head, we noticed that there was no clear winner. Both the phones have some advantages over the other. For example the Wave 2 has a larger and higher resolution display and a camera with auto focus, which despite the lower resolution, is bound to produce better quality images than the C7's 8 megapixel camera.
On the other hand, the C7 has a stronger Gorilla glass display, 8GB of internal memory and FM transmitter. The C7 also benefits from more applications as the Ovi store is in far better shape than the bada store, which is strange as the bada store has been around longer than the Ovi store. So if you want to install apps and games on your phone then the C7 is the better choice. It really boils down to what you are looking for in your phone. As far as the interface and operating system are concerned, both are on par, with bada having a very slight edge in terms of visual appeal.
If you want a phone with a better camera and display, then we would suggest the Wave 2. If you want to install applications onto your phone then C7 would be a better choice.
Verdict
The Nokia C7 is priced at Rs. 18,999. For that price the phone does offer a lot of good features. It looks great, has a superb display with sturdy Gorilla glass protection, is feature rich, the multimedia performance apart from the camera is very good and Ovi store is growing at a decent rate. However, we feel it would make much more sense to plonk a few thousand rupees more and get the N8 instead. As good as the C7 is the N8 is much better and is worth the extra cash you would spend on it.
Also, soon Nokia will launch the C6, which has almost the same features as the C7 but in a smaller shape and less attractive design and is bound to be priced lower. It would make more sense to go for the C6 then. As such we cannot really recommend buying the C7 now unless you are really hooked on to the design of the phone and don't mind paying more than the C6 for it. So we would suggest you either go for the more expensive but also much better N8 or save some cash by waiting for the C6, which would be out in January.
Bundle
- Nokia C7-00
- Battery BL-5K
- Charger AC-15
- Stereo Headset WH-102
- USB Cable CA-101D
- Quick start guide
The C7's biggest party trick is its design and it pulls it off spectacularly every time. We were never really pleased with the designs of Nokia phones in the past, except for a few notable exceptions, such as the 88xx series phones and the original 7610, but the designs of their high-end phones have improved dramatically. The C7 looks as if the words "suave" and "svelte" were invented just to define its design. And if by looking at the pictures you think we are exaggerating you really need to see it for yourself.
The phone doesn't just look good. Pick one up and you will tend to like it even more. The phone feels incredibly solid and at the same time it's very thin as well. Much of the way the phone looks and feels is down to the materials it uses. Most of the front is the Gorilla glass, which has a mirror-like finish, especially around the edges of the screen. The front edges are made of solid metal, which curve gracefully. The sides and some portion of the back are made of plastic. The battery cover once again is made of metal, which happens to be stainless steel.
The phone is sold in three color options. We received the black color version, which we think is the best of the lot, but you also get the silver and bronze versions, the latter having a slight red tint to it.
On the front of the phone you will find the video call camera, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor above the display next to the earpiece. Below the display are the controls, the middle one being for menu and the other two for receiving and ending calls. The N8 had the former placed too far down and lacked either of the latter buttons. While we appreciate that the menu button has been moved to a more convenient location and made nicer to use, we don't understand what was the need to have the call and end keys, as their function is clearly performed by the on-screen buttons when you receive a call. The only advantage we can think of this arrangement is that you have quick access to the last called number, thanks to the call button.
On the right side of the phone are the volume control buttons near the top with the voice recording key in the middle. It is strange to see this key on a non-Eseries Nokia phone. In the middle is the sliding lock key and a bit too far below is the camera shutter button. On the left side of the phone is the charger port.
On the top of the phone is the micro USB port under a flap and a small LED that turns on when the phone is charging. The C7 supports charging over USB. In the middle is the 3.5mm headphone jack and on the right is the power button.
On the back you will notice the 8 megapixel camera lens with dual LED flash. You will also see two grilles above and below the lens. However, only the one above has the loudspeaker underneath, while the one below is a dummy for design congruence. Open the battery cover and you can see that the SIM can be accessed without removing the battery. However, for some strange reason, the microSD card cannot be accessed until you remove the battery.
Display
The Nokia C7 has a 3.5-inch 640 x 360 resolution AMOLED display capable of outputting 16 million colors. The display is protected by a highly scratch resistant Gorilla glass. And when they say scratch resistant, they mean scratch resistant. We rubbed keys, screws and whatever sharp object we could find, but nothing could put even a hairline scratch on the C7's display. You can put the C7 in a pocket or bag full of keys and it would come out unscathed.
The picture quality of the display is excellent. Indoors the display put up some vibrant colors with crisp details and deep blacks, typical of AMOLED displays. The good thing about the C7's AMOLED display is that, unlike the one on Samsung phones, they aren't tuned to display outrageously vivid colors. Instead, images look attractive yet natural, just the way we like them.
Being an AMOLED display we were worried about the display's visibility under the sun, but it absolutely shocked us in that aspect. Nokia's AMOLED display can match the best Super AMOLED display that Samsung has to offer in terms of legibility under sunlight. It was hard to believe that it was an AMOLED display; it's that good. It's actually better than some LCDs under the sun, including many of Nokia's own.
Software and Applications
The Nokia C7 is the second phone to run on the Symbian ^3 platform after the N8. We have already covered the OS in detail in our dedicated Symbian^3 review. All we have to say is that, even though it is highly improved over its predecessor, it still cannot match other operating systems such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7.
It doesn't feel particularly modern and lacks finesse, and although it works well, at the end of the day when the job's done you wish it could have been done better.
The number of applications as of now is limited, and although there is a decent number of them to start off with, you don't have too many to choose from right now, especially when it comes to games. In the end, I wouldn't say the software on the C7 is a complete disappointment, but there is still some room for improvement.
Connectivity
The N8 had the most comprehensive list of connectivity features that we have seen on any device and the C7 retains every one of them. First of all, it is a quad band GSM 2G and quint band GSM 3G handset, just like the N8. This gives the C7 the ability work in almost every country in the world. Then it has Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS and USB On-the-Go connectivity. Unfortunately, unlike the N8, the C7 does not come with an adaptor for plugging in your flash drives into the phone and you may have to purchase that separately.
The call quality and network reception both were excellent on the C7. The loudspeaker was pretty loud, so ringtones were heard loud and clear. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS performance too was extremely satisfactory. As far as USB transfer speeds are concerned, the C7 is one of the faster devices we have tested.
Messaging on the C7 has seen an improvement over the N8. This is because of the Swype keyboard that is not available for the C7 on the Ovi Store. Surprisingly, C7 is the only Symbian ^3 device that has got Swype available for it. Unfortunately though, Swype is only available in landscape mode, which kind of defeats the purpose of having it. Swype is most useful when used in portrait mode when you can just use your thumb to input text. In landscape mode, it is inconvenient to hold the phone with one hand while swiping your finger on the other hand. Still, it is better than using either of the default keyboards available in Symbian. We hope that portrait QWERTY keyboard that is rumored to arrive on Symbian comes soon or at least Swype finds a way to make theirs work in portrait.
Multimedia
The Nokia C7 has an 8 megapixel camera. When we first heard the specs of the phone we were quite impressed by it. But it was only later that we realized that the camera has a fixed focus mechanism. Why would Nokia choose to play such a cruel trick on people is beyond us. The C7 does not even use the Carl Zeiss optics that high-end Nokia phones are usually equipped with. It is just a standard camera with a very impressive resolution. But as you may know by now, resolution itself does not guarantee quality. In fact, the C7 camera is the perfect example of this.
Now don't get us wrong. The C7's camera is not terrible by any stretch of imagination. But it is not what we would expect from a high-end Nokia phone, not after what we have seen what they did with the N8. Of course we did not expect that level of quality, but the C7 does not even come close to matching it is what we found most depressing. Having said that, for someone who doesn't know what the N8 camera does or is interested in photography in general wouldn't mind the C7's image quality at all.
The main issues we had with the camera, apart from the lack of focusing of course, is poor details despite the high resolution. The noise reducing algorithm is too strict, which ends up softening all the details in the image. In order to compensate for that, the post processing algorithm makes the image excessively sharp to give the illusion of enhanced details. The resultant images are unpleasant to look at when viewed at 100% zoom level.
At the same time though, thanks to the high resolution, when you are not viewing the images at 100% zoom they actually look pretty decent. However, they look their best when you are viewing them on the phone's excellent display. In fact you would never know that the camera has any issues at all if you always look at the images on the phone's display, which does a brilliant job of hiding the camera's flaws. Even images taken a couple of feet away from the subject, which otherwise would look clearly out of focus on a computer screen, look sharp on the phone's display.
The best results are found when shooting during the day but even low light images are pretty usable, especially if all you do with them is upload them on Facebook. The flash on the phone is a bit of a problem, because the range in which it is effective also happens to be the range where the focusing is a problem. So if the image is well lit, chances are it would be out of focus. But like I said before, if you are just going to view them on the phone's display then you might as well take them from a closer distance.
One good thing about the camera is that it is fast. The startup time is quick and even the shot to shot time is pretty low. This despite the fact that the phone churns out 8 megapixel images that are large in file size. The lack of auto focus also means that you can quickly take a snap without having to wait for the camera to focus. Although this does come at the cost of quality loss, but for those who are unaware of auto focus (and believe me there are plenty of them) will find that the C7 is faster than most phones out there with auto focus.
The C7 also records 720p videos. The video quality was on par with that of the N8. Outdoors as well as indoor videos came out well and looked especially good on the phone's display. Too bad it does not come with an HDMI output to view them on your TV.
Moving on, the music player on the C7 has seen some improvements since S60. The format support is still the same though and we would have liked to see support for lossless formats such as FLAC. It has a coverflow like album browser that also works in portrait mode with the track titles displayed below. The manual equalizer has been removed but you now get twenty stops on the volume scale compared to the previous ten.
The audio quality on the C7 is fabulous and the phone can go really loud as well. Unfortunately, the quality of earphones shipped with the phone is rather mediocre, which shouldn't be the case with such an expensive phone and is unbecoming of Nokia. The loudspeaker on the C7 is also fairly loud for a single speaker, but it doesn't really sound that great.
Video playback on the C7 is pretty good and much improved over older S60 phones. It can now play AVI and MKV formats with DivX and Xvid codecs in 720p resolution. However, the playback was a bit unreliable. At times a file would refuse to play and in some cases it would play, but there would be no sound. This usually happened with HD files, while SD files played with almost no trouble at all.
The image viewer on the C7 is pretty good. It supports pinch to zoom but we actually preferred to use the slider on the side as it was easier. The image gallery is pretty fast with the images and even high resolution images open up quickly. Much of the credit goes to the dedicated GPU the phone has, which enables swift processing of all graphics on the device.
The C7 also comes with a very comprehensive image and video editor on board. In fact the image editor has the most number of features that we have ever seen on a mobile phone before. The video editor is pretty good too and lets you create videos or slideshows using your videos and images as well as the music stored on the device.
The phone also has an FM radio and more importantly an FM transmitter. Nokia seems to be the only manufacturer that has bothered to include it in their devices, which is sad, as this feature is really convenient.
Battery Life
The Nokia C7 has the same 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery as the N8, but in this case it is user replaceable. With heavy usage, which consisted of several calls, messages, video playback, audio playback, video streaming, web browsing over Wi-Fi, GPS usage, camera usage with flash and video recording, the phone gave us one full day of battery life. That is very impressive and had we not used the phone so much we could have easily eked out at least two days out of the battery. Do keep in mind though that we tested the phone on a 2G network, as we usually do here. With 3G the battery life will go down further.
Competition
The Nokia C7 is priced on par with the Samsung Wave 2 and the two phones have a lot of similarities, which is where the confusion arises. Which one would you choose if you are in the market to buy a phone in that price range?
Now we are yet to review the Wave 2 but we have reviewed the original Wave and have a fair idea how the new phone is going to be. When we put both the phones head to head, we noticed that there was no clear winner. Both the phones have some advantages over the other. For example the Wave 2 has a larger and higher resolution display and a camera with auto focus, which despite the lower resolution, is bound to produce better quality images than the C7's 8 megapixel camera.
On the other hand, the C7 has a stronger Gorilla glass display, 8GB of internal memory and FM transmitter. The C7 also benefits from more applications as the Ovi store is in far better shape than the bada store, which is strange as the bada store has been around longer than the Ovi store. So if you want to install apps and games on your phone then the C7 is the better choice. It really boils down to what you are looking for in your phone. As far as the interface and operating system are concerned, both are on par, with bada having a very slight edge in terms of visual appeal.
If you want a phone with a better camera and display, then we would suggest the Wave 2. If you want to install applications onto your phone then C7 would be a better choice.
Verdict
The Nokia C7 is priced at Rs. 18,999. For that price the phone does offer a lot of good features. It looks great, has a superb display with sturdy Gorilla glass protection, is feature rich, the multimedia performance apart from the camera is very good and Ovi store is growing at a decent rate. However, we feel it would make much more sense to plonk a few thousand rupees more and get the N8 instead. As good as the C7 is the N8 is much better and is worth the extra cash you would spend on it.
Also, soon Nokia will launch the C6, which has almost the same features as the C7 but in a smaller shape and less attractive design and is bound to be priced lower. It would make more sense to go for the C6 then. As such we cannot really recommend buying the C7 now unless you are really hooked on to the design of the phone and don't mind paying more than the C6 for it. So we would suggest you either go for the more expensive but also much better N8 or save some cash by waiting for the C6, which would be out in January.
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