Nokia remains the world's number one mobile phone maker despite failing to stand up to the more popular Androids, Blackberry and iPhones. Now comes a new handset taking off from the failed X3 slider handset released December last year and now morphs into a fusion of the old and new.
The Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type comes as the first Nokia handset to carry both a touchscreen and a conventional 12-key alpha-numeric keypad in the familiar candybar form factor.
Sporting the same sharp-cornered sleek styling it shares with the earlier X3 and X6, the new handset certainly looks handsome and at about €150, it should sit well among budget conscious crowds looking for a high feature high value phone.
It even comes in 4 stylish colors of white silver, lilac pink, petrol blue and dark metal to please the younger crowd. Turn it on and you're greeted with the same old Symbian S40 look and feel that immediately tells you there's nothing outstanding about it other than a great price on a feature rich phone.
Features at a Glance
With a smorgasbord of data and radio connectivity features, the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type is tops with a quad band UMTS radio and HDDPA/HSUPA data speeds on 3G as well as quad band GSM radio and class 10 GPRS/EDGE on 2G. It comes with hotspot surfing support with WiFi 802/11 b/g/n and the usual wireless and wired data transfers and syncing with Bluetooth v2.1 with A2SP and miniUSB v2.0, respectively. There's GPS support, though.
As a candybar phone, it measures a slim 106.2 x 48.4 x 96mm and weighs a very light 77.4g though it can feel a bit plasticky in your hands. It gets a 2.4-inch TFT LCD screen with QVGA resolution and 256k colors which is a departure from the usual 16 million colors Nokia handsets often have.
But this time, the display enjoys resistive touchscreen technology. Imaging gets generously competent with a now standard 5 megapixel camera. Just don't expect LED flash or autofocus or anything fancy like face detection or geo tagging.
It's a music phone with a 3.5mm audio jack and dedicated music playback keys on the body. It comes with the stereo FM radio with RDS and the players for the popular audio and video files.
For storing multimedia files, don't bother with its scant 50 MB onboard memory but use a microSD card for up to 32 GB of external memory capacity which it supports. A rather impoverished 860mAh Li-ion battery powers it up for a talk time of 2.3 hours on 2G and 3.3 hours on 3G with up to 28 hours of music playback time and 408 hours on standby mode.
Conclusion
The Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type exemplifies everything about Nokia these days - a brand struggling to retain its leadership and dong so purely by underpricing. When you have nothing to offer to best the competing Androids, Blackberrys and iPhone out there, the only way to compete is in price.
Its insistence in using the antiquated Symbian OS, despite getting new iterations, is effectively a white flag to the Android and the iPhone. You will never find a flagship handset in other brands where a flagship like the Nokia N8 is priced less than €400.
But the market is not complaining. Nokia is still a great brand and for it to be priced less that the competition for highly capable hardware sets can be a real blessing.
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