Nokia have spent the past few years fighting with Apple and HTC in the smartphone market. Whereas Apple's marketing strategy tends to concentrate on the total user experience and HTC on their clever Android software, Nokia have chosen to try to compete on technical prowess, an area they have done well with in recent years.
The Nokia C7 is something of a rarity then, with Nokia's sales pitch focussed on the fact that the C7 is amongst the first handsets to use the new third edition of the Symbian operating system. It's still no slouch in terms of its technical specification however, featuring a large 3.5 inch AMOLED glass capacitive touchscreen able to display 720p video, and looking amazing while doing it. The case design is also very fashionable at less than 11mm thick and features a stainless steel frame that feels tough and expensive.
The front of the Nokia C7 is taken up by its large touchscreen, but there is also room for call start and end controls plus a generic menu button. There is an extra microphone mounted on the back of the handset to provide noise-cancelling functionality, and the C7 packs a high quality 8 megapixel camera capable of capturing 720p video. Internal memory is 8GB out of the box, but this can be easily supplemented using microSD cards up to 32GB.
The Nokia C7 runs the latest Symbian 3 OS, which has been significantly redesigned for use on touchscreen handsets and includes contact integration for social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. The three available accessible home screens are entirely customizable with widgets for showing unread emails, weather and news reports, location details, and contacts social networking status. The Nokia C7 also features support for Microsoft Exchange and up to 10 webmail accounts, plus proper seamless multi-tasking and solid media player functionality.
Symbian 3 marks a huge improvement over previous iterations, but it still lags behind iOS and Android in several areas. This is a real shame, as in terms of hardware, Nokia have created another powerful handset that deserves its place in any smartphone buyer's shortlist. Sadly, the attractive design and great battery life cannot make up for a lack of quality free widgets and an onscreen keyboard that makes text entry a chore. Because so much of today's smartphone experience comes down to the operating system, Nokia's failure to effectively compete in this area becomes a real handicap, and so it's hard to recommend the Nokia C7 over similarly priced phones from HTC or Samsung.
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