In the world of mobile phone gadget wizardry, technical innovation often comes in small packages and far between. They can come as hardware innovation like capacitive touchscreen, AMOLED and then Super AMOLED displays.
They can be from software apps natively supported such as Swipe texting, or gesture control and pinch to zoom, to mention a few.  Sometimes, a good innovation comes from doing new things with what you already have.
Nokia does just that with the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type feature phone. The name is a dead giveaway as it combines touchscreen technology and conventional tactile alphanumeric keypad on a candybar form factor.
The concept isn’t really new. You already have full sized touchscreens with landscape QWERTY keyboard sliders. The recent Blackberry Torch does the same thing but on a portrait orientation that gives the handset the signature Blackberry-esque look when open.
But the new Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type does it for a non-smartphone at near mid-range price points. It’s the Finnish mobile phone leader’s first handset in this mix. Given the wide popularity of its candybars, Nokia should have done this earlier at about the time touchscreens were starting to become popular.
The concept makes a lot of sense for people wanting to wade into the new technologies while still retaining a foot on the old.
S40 Touch Debuts
The key to getting it done was Nokia’s S50 Touch UI. For years, Nokia has been taking its sweet time to bring the S40 UI to the touchscreen functionality that its Korean rivals have long enjoyed with their own UI layers like Touchwiz for Samsung.
It’s finally here with the S50 Touch and it debuts on the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type. Based on the new S40 Rel 6.0, the S40 Touch allows Nokia to implement the UI with or without touchscreen.
It’s just a matter of activating this feature in tandem with a resistive touchscreen display or have the functionality disabled with a regular TFT LCD display. As a UI solution for entry level handsets, don’t expect capacitive touchscreen support on it. But it won’t be surprising if Nokia develops one.
Here, the S40 Touch obviously gets to showcase its prowess using a 2.4-inch resistive touchscreen on the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type. As can be expected, you can only squeeze in a QVGA resolution at this size and 256k color support, good enough for vibrant colors even under the sun and you won’t miss a 16 million color depth which is always overkill at this size and resolution.
Ergonomics
Measuring a slim 106.2 x 48.4 x 9.6mm, it’s easy to see this Nokia to be among the thinnest handsets on the market, candybar or otherwise. That it should weigh a pocket friendly 77.4g makes it even more remarkable. The Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type is obviously pitched to young crowd with some fashion flair as it comes in four stylish colors of dark metal, lilac pink, white silver and petrol blue.
Now does it make sense to mix the two data input technologies? Judging from early use, it does. The handset is a good option for people who prefer the tactile sensation when keying data while getting the convenience of touchscreen for menu scrolling and selection.
It should be noted though that for people used to a 5-point joystick, navigational ball or track pad and a confirm key, they won’t find them here as the touchscreen takes care of the function.
One of the main complaints on touchscreens is you can’t really go on a one-hand operation on a resistive touchscreen for some functions. Nokia’s solution solves that nicely. One hand operation is always easy on an alphanumeric keypad.
A touchscreen added to it benefits the handset with a more intuitive navigational control of the menu than is possible with a trackball or trackpad.
About the only caveat here is that you need to bring the menu icons a bit larger so that touch input can make sense on a small screen. People with large fingers might find this hybrid solution less appealing and may prefer the usual center joystick or navigational pointing buttons.
Features At a Glance
- The Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type is a 3G phone with HSDPA/HSUPA data speeds on a quad band UMTS. That means Nokia just made international roaming on 3G easy for handset at this price. Not just on 2G, which this phone can also do with its quad band GSM with class 10 GPRS/EDGE for up to 236.8 Kbps data speeds. You get broadband speeds for your internet surfing on either but HSDPA/HSUPA, if your carrier supports it, guarantees a really fast no-wait surfing experience on the road.
- SatNav gets judiciously taken out to bring the price down, but you still get hotspot surfing support with WiFi 802/11 b/g/n. Local high speed data transfers and synching with your PC or similar portable gadgets get served with microUSB v2.0 and Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP for wired and wireless options, respectively.
- Bringing the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type to compete with mainstream camera phones meant putting in a digital camera with great resolution. But in the interest of not upping the price tag, it gets no autofocus, no LED flash and none of the fancy features you’d expect from the better camera phones. You still get 4X digital zoom and video capture facility on a VGA resolution at 18fps frame rates.
- Like its XpressMusic and Comes with Music cousins, the Nokia X3-02 Touch and Type is a capable and competitive music phone that has dedicated music playback keys. You get an onboard stereo FM radio with RDS and the expected media players for the popular audio and video files. Stereo listening comes with two options - from a 3.5 mm audio jack using your favorite high fidelity headphones or from its A2DP profile support using stereo Bluetooth headsets.
- Onboard storage is not much at 50 MB but no matter, you have microSD external memory expandability for up to 32 GB
Its li-ion battery is modest at 860 mAh which, when fully charged, powers the handset up to 28 hours of nonstop music listening, talk times of 5.3 hours on 2G and 3.3 hours on 3G as well as 408 hours on standby mode. You can compare Nokia X3 Touch & Type deals here at Best Mobile Contracts, or you can read more views on this phone with the Nokia Touch & Type reviews.
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