November 17, 2011
By Hanleigh Daniels

Nokia made a name for itself in terms of excellent QWERTY keyboards with its E-series smartphones such as the E72 and our latest communicator the E7.The C3-00 brings that fantastic finger-loving QWERTY keyboard together with easy access to your favourite social networking sites such as Facebook.

This grip and pocket-friendly (115.5 x 58.1 x 13.6 mm) device sports a QWERTY keyboard that greatly accelerates typing speed as well as accuracy when chatting and composing an email or SMS. The on-board email application makes a trouble-free email setup process possible and will work with all the popular mail accounts.

The C3-00’s vibrant 2.4″ (320 x 240 pixels) transmissive LCD display will remain visible even in direct sunlight. This smartphone’s home-screen can be edited and allows for quick access to amongst other your favourite contacts, your Facebook status, as well as your friend updates and notifications, which social networking addicts will really appreciate. A bunch of handy apps come pre-installed on the C3-00 including a currency converter, calculator, To-do list and voice recorder, but you are able to download many more from the Ovi Store.

As with Nokia’s other phones, the C3-00 features some excellent battery life with its 1320 mAh Li-Ion battery delivering talk time of up to 7 hours, standby time of up to 800 hours and music playback time (in offline mode) of up to 30 hours.

With 55 MB of internal storage available, you may wish to expand upon that via the use of a microSD card and the C3-00 supports cards up to 8 GB in size. It also sports Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, a 2 megapixel camera, a 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack so you can listen to music or  Stereo FM radio via your headset and Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g, enabling a maximum data transfer speed of up to 54 Mbps. For a more comprehensive look at the C3-00’s features check out our local C3-00 page.

So for social networking and messaging fans that prefer a physical keyboard over a touch-screen the affordable C3-00 might be right up your mobile alley.