Hands on with the Nokia C6, C7, and N8

We’ve already spent some time with Nokia's N8 handset earlier in the month, so we won’t spend too long on it for this report. We will mention the newly announced price, though, as it does affect our feelings towards the phone somewhat since its last outing.

With the E7 aimed at business users, positioned as a spiritual successor to the excellent, and huge, communicator series, we decided to take the mid-to-upper range C6 and C7 devices for a spin at the Nokia World event in London and see what they can offer both mobile lovers and pocket gamers.

The C7 is the bigger brother of the C6, retaining a similar design but packing the same CPU/GPU combo as the N8. While the two C phones look similar in photographs, it only takes a brief moment holding both to realise which one has the higher price tag.

The C7’s shell contains all the sleek, rounded edges of a premium phone, and feels far more expensive than the C6 and its slightly plastic feel.

This is never more apparent than in the side buttons, used for volume and the camera.

The camera is in the same place on the two models, yet, due mainly to the construction of the body, the C6’s buttons feel like they're stuck on to the wrong phone. This is especially strange considering Nokia’s normally solid build quality when it comes to budget-to-mid range phones.

The C7 also benefits from a larger AMOLED screen than its little brother – measuring in at exactly the same size as the N8 at 3.5” (8.89 cm), although the lower-resolution camera (8MP compared to 12MP) and lack of an HDMI port puts the brakes on any thoughts of supplanting it in terms of media capabilities.

Both the C-series handsets come with the new Symbian^3 OS, with a redesigned UI that takes advantage of multiple home screens and an absolute ton of default widgets.

The emphasis of the C6 is apparently for the mid-range, heavy social-networking user according to the keynote speech, and it’s true that Social Networking is one of the two widgets on the home screen.

However, the interface is uniform across the range of new handsets, which slightly undermines the idea that there’s any one that’s more suited to the task than another.

Disappointingly from a pocket gamer’s perspective, the SIM-free models only come with two demo games pre-installed – Ovi Maps Challenge and Climate Mission – the first consisting of a geography quiz and the second playing like a terrible ‘edutainment’ game you might have found in a IBM-compatible bargain bin, circa 1991.

Another disappointing feature of the handsets is that neither yet carries a price-tag, making comparisons with similar competing models tough. The estimated prices are said to be around €260 for the C6 and €335 for the C7, but these have yet to be confirmed by Nokia.

When we last looked at the N8 in early August, the price for the new flagship Symbian^3 smartphone was around that of a solid upper-mid-range handset, putting the media powerhouse in a strong position to bag customers tempted by the Android charms of the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S.

The build quality and feature-list since then has obviously not changed one iota – the 12MP camera and 720p output producing some stunning images on both the big screens of the show floor.

What has changed, though, is that Nokia has confirmed the price of the SIM-free model to be £429.99 – putting the handset between the prices of the HTC and Samsung Android handsets.