In our review of the Dell Venue Pro, we mentioned that a touch screen and physical keypad was the way to go for smartphones. Nokia has taken this design mantra and applied it to its mid-range phones, the X3-02 and C3-01 – calling it the Touch and Type technology. This week, we took on the X3-02 to find out if this trend is here to stay.

First impressions

The X3-02 is a beautifully designed phone. Weighing just 77g, it's incredibly light. It's also very thin, which makes it really easy to slip the handset even into your skinny jeans pocket. We got a white-bodied unit, which looked very sophisticated, but the phone is also available in Petrol Blue, Dark Metal, Lilac and Pink.

Compared to the handset's overall dimensions, we felt that the 2.4-inch screen was large. Our only gripe was that it's a resistive touch screen, which is quite archaic. While it is much improved compared to the resistive screens of yore, it still isn't as smooth as a capacitive screen, and we had some issues when it came to scrolling.

The keypad on this phone is an alpha-numeric one, with four rows and four columns of buttons. The first row has a call and end button on the extreme ends, and the middle two buttons are for messaging and music, which were handy and often-used shortcuts. However, they are dedicated function keys, and cannot be swapped.

Nokia has added an extra column of buttons to the keypad, which include the space button and the ‘Silence' button. This spaces out the keypad nicely and makes it feel quite roomy. The keys are large and we were able to type out text messages really fast using the T9 dictionary.

The rear side of the phone has a pop-out silver panel which houses the battery. There is also a 5-megapixel camera, but no flash. The top has a 3.5-mm headphone jack, charging port as well as mini-USB port. We were pleased to find out that the phone can also charge via USB, which is really useful.

The sides hold a volume rocker switch as well as a button to lock the screen, but no dedicated camera button.

User Interface

The phone runs on the outdated Series 40 interface, but it seems to work rather well on a touch screen. Of course, the downside is that there's only a single home screen, even though customisations are possible. The home screen has a bar on top with the time and date. Below that is a favourites bar, to which you can add four contacts, with photos. There's a shortcut bar to which you can add any application, and ours had Mail configured. There's also a bar for widgets, which can also be customised with the programs you choose. Further down on the home screen is a standard bar which holds three buttons, for Menu, Names and Go To. The last brings up a list of functions at a glance, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The phone is also 3G enabled, which is great considering even the Nokia C3 doesn't have the feature.

Media

The phone has an inbuilt media player, which displays your music list along with album art. The phone was supplied with a pair of in-ear noise cancelling headphones, which were of excellent quality. There's also FM radio. The camera is a 5-megger, but images looked quite washed out. It did function pretty well in low light though, which was impressive. Photos are displayed as a timeline, so you can navigate by date. You can also browse through them by swiping the screen.

The phone has no default SNS apps – so you'll either have to download a third party client like Snaptu from the Ovi Store, or use the mobile versions of the sites. We loaded Facebook on the phone using the touch version of the site, and it was pretty easy to navigate.

The Opera Mini browser functioned quite well, and we were able to load the Smartbuy website in a couple of seconds on a GPRS connection. The phone doesn't support pinch to zoom, but you can use double tap if you want to magnify the screen.

The phone comes preloaded with Mail and Nokia Chat. It took us just a couple of minutes to set up our Gmail account. The Nokia Messaging Service 3.0 functions as push mail, so you get alerts when you get a new email.

Performance

Call quality on the handset was average. We had some issues with the network dropping, and occasionally callers on the other end complained that they couldn't hear us for the first couple of seconds. The speaker also has to be positioned exactly at your ear, because if it moves even slightly the conversation is barely audible.

Battery life, as with all Nokia phones, was excellent on the X3-02. We didn't have to even look at our charger for two days, despite heavy talktime and browsing.

Our Verdict

With its sleek looks and touch and type combo, the Nokia X3-02 is bound to have a lot of takers. It's the perfect upgrade for people looking to change their basic phone, who don't want all the fuss that comes with a feature heavy smartphone.

Love: Slim build, long battery life

Hate: Resistive touch screen, outdated OS

Rs 8,839

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