My fondness for Symbian is hardly a secret at this point, so when the Nokia C7 was announced I was looking forward to it more than the N8, so much in fact that I decided to wait for its release. I ordered the C7 as soon as it was available, but despite being excited to finally get my hands on a Symbian^3 device it was only with me for 24 hours before I returned it.
There were mainly three reasons for returning it.
Browser. If you have read any review of the N8 or C7 you will know that the browser has been widely criticized. To be honest, I think most reviewers have been too kind in their criticism because the browser is, by far, the worst browser on any smartphone platform out there right now. It is so bad it is borders on being unusable: it is extremely slow at loading pages, scrolling on desktop sites is choppy at best, it does not auto
fit the page to the screen width when you zoom in and it doesn’t have multiple tabs. In short, there is absolutely nothing positive that can be said about the browser.
Text input. With no portrait qwerty keyboard on board and the fact that entering text is done in “pop-up” mode, any text input is a chore.
Multitasking. No, it’s not what it sounds like. Rather, it’s a usability issue in S^3. The sliding of the horizontal list of open apps is fun for about oh 30 seconds. You then discover that you constantly overshoot the app you are looking for so you end up slowly dragging the list instead of swiping it. It’s definitely a step backward from the previous icon grid of open apps.
Then there were minor issues such as the threaded messaging: it looks nice but it’s rather slow, every time you send or receive a message it blacks out for second when it updates the list. And of course the old Symbian alarm “feature” is still there.
On a positive note though, the Bluetooth issue has been completely resolved.
In all the Nokia C7 was a rather disappointing experience, and one that left a dent in my faith in Symbian, not because Symbian doesn’t have the potential to be a great OS but rather because of Nokia and their inability for the last few years to rapidly execute plans. The next few months, what with Meego and the promised Symbian updates, will be crucial for Nokia.
