We’ve had the Nokia C7 for over a week and it’s the first Symbian^3 device we’ve got our hands on. The C7-00 is a full touch device and sports a 8MP lens along with all the other features. Here’s the initial impressions for you to go through while the detailed review gets cooked.

What was interesting:

Hardware

• The way it’s built. Sleek and packed with all features, it did make heads turn. Sturdy material all around with a bit of stainless steel for the back cover.
• It’s capacitive display was amazingly responsive and worked pretty well throughout. Compared to the Nokia X6, which is the C7′s predecessor on the capacitive, the C7 had no touchscreen lag except for a couple seconds while pinching to zoom.

Build quality of the three physical buttons beneath the screen is top notch. The menu button feels great to hold to and doubles up as a notification/breathing light as well.

> The screen lock key when held for a longer time turns your phone into a flashlight. While you help yourself in the dark, the dual LEDs guide you and can be shut the same way you switched them on.

>A MicroUSB and a standard 2mm port are present to charge your device. This is pretty useful, expanding your compatibility options.

Software

• Three homescreens with widgets helped a lot while navigating through the phone and getting to the apps you use a lot.
• You can unlock the phone with the touchscreen, too which was previously limited only to the slider switch. Now, a simple box pops up at the bottom of the screen which on a single press unlocks your phone.
• Supports Animated wallpapers out-of-the-box and a lot of overall bugs fixed over S60V5.
• Music player’s Cover flow and Album organization is interesting and simple to use.
• The settings menu is well arranged with options falling in place, a nifty update here.

And, here’s what wasn’t:

Hardware

• The camera is a very poor performer. Spite having a 8MP lens, photos are mediocre and does not have Auto-focus. We’re not sure if the camera can be blamed on the lack of a Carl-Zeiss entirely.
• While every phone’s got a hot swappable memory slot these days, it’s tucked under the battery neatly on this. So, you need to open your back panel cover, remove the battery and insert your microSD while the SIM card is right under the panel. Hope Nokia’s listening?
• Sunlight visibility is not up to our expectations. Better than previous models, but a lot more work is needed on the AMOLED.
• Awkward positioning of the speakers. Right at the back, adjacent to the camera blocking all the sound you can get unless the phone’s faced down.

Software

• The Social App on the phone rarely seemed to function, throwing an error everytime I tried logging in to my twitter.
• While I’m typing messages with the Portrait T9, the phone begins to slow down in displaying the words on the preview box once the character count is above 250 odd. And I was thinking the Nokia 3310 was the last phone to have this lag.
• Can’t upload photos directly to facebook or twitter. Third party app like Pixelpipe needed.
• You can’t drag to the next homescreen (like the iPhone) , you have to swap. The whole feel of it is lost here, I’d say.
• The conversations feature on the SMS box seemed to be sluggish while scrolling through, pretty irritating at times.

And, yeah. Maps work great with position lock working amazingly fast, atleast at our place! More on this in the full review.

Well, that’s all with the Nokia C7-00 for now. As the days progress, we might come across something exciting or Nokia might release a software update fixing some of the above features[Eh, maybe]

Just before I wrap this post up here, the Nokia C7 is priced at Rs.19,500 in the Indian markets today.

Do let us know if you’ve got questions about the phone or it’s functionality so that we can cover that up in the review as well.