Dual-SIM is usually the domain of no-name brands, and the few models signed by top makers are well worth a look. Because when you need to make a lot of calls on a shoestring, nothing beats the likes of the Nokia C2-00.
Nokia C2-00 official photos
The Nokia C2-00 seems like a mid-range phone from the nineties at first, but this modest handset actually makes a lot of sense, and use. Being a dual-SIM, dual-standby phone is the obvious highlight: you can have two active phone lines in the same device.
Better still, the second SIM card is easily hot-swappable through a side-mounted slot, so you can juggle multiple SIM cards with relative ease. You also get support for large microSD cards so the C2-00 can double as a music player or an FM radio with recording capabilities (in some markets). Plus, the loudspeaker is extra loud on this one.
There's no hiding that the Nokia C2-00 is a cheap phone - the camera is as basic as they get. But instead of putting fancy disguises, Nokia went ahead and added some features to make the C2-00 even more helpful. Here's what you get.
Key features
- Entry level dual-SIM, dual-standby phone with decent features
- Dual-band GSM/EDGE connectivity
- Hot-swappable second SIM
- 1.8" 65K-color 128x160 TFT display
- Series 40 UI, 6th edition
- Fixed-focus VGA camera
- QCIF video recording @ 10fps
- Nokia Messaging and Ovi Chat
- Stereo FM radio with RDS; broadcast recording (in some markets)
- Bluetooth 2.1 (with EDR)
- Standard microUSB port
- microSD card slot (32GB supported)
- 3.5mm audio jack
Main disadvantages
- No quad-band or 3G connectivity for either SIM card
- Doesn’t charge off its USB port
- Very basic camera with subpar image quality
- No smart dialing
- Miserable display (viewing angles are slim at best)
- No flashlight (just kidding)
The Nokia C2-00 software package offers extras such as an Expense Manager app - a relevant addition to a budget-minded phone. There's also an English-Chinese dictionary built-in (this feature is region dependant) and an app that will give you tips on how to use the phone.
Hardly impressive to a smartphone owner, those are just the type of things that can add value to a handset meant for emerging markets.
Nokia C2-00 live shots
In the price range of the Nokia C2-00 you can't really expect much from the box, besides the phone itself and the charger. You do get a decent one-piece headset, which ups the value of the package a bit. There's no microUSB cable with which to manage files on the phone but you can use a microSD card reader for that or grab a cable yourself (those are as low as a couple of bucks). The design of the Nokia C2-00 is as basic as it gets: a screen, two soft keys and call buttons around a D-pad and a phone keypad below. And by the way, we don’t mean basic in a bad way. This layout has been used just about since the dawn of time (of mobile phones anyway) and it’s proven to work. We wouldn’t mind if the C2-00 was a bit thinner, but durability counts more than styling as far as such phones are concerned. The Nokia C2-00 is solidly built though its plastic body is likely to get scratched pretty quickly. Aesthetics will suffer but overall, the phone will keep working – it’s what this kind of phones do. The 1.8” TFT screen has a resolution of 128 x 160 and is about as basic as can be while still warranting the title "color screen". In all honesty though, there are still smartphones around with that screen resolution, as well as entry level handsets with even lower-res displays. So it’s not all bad on this boy. Brightness is low (and fixed, since there's no setting or an ambient light sensor), colors are dull and viewing angles are slim as a knife blade. If you're not looking at it dead on, there's severe color shifting and loss of contrast. On the positive side, the super limited viewing angles will give you an extra piece of mind when you need the privacy – say, while riding on the underground. Most disappointingly however, is that the sunlight legibility is very poor. The softkeys and D-pad are well-sized but rather stiff. The call keys are more responsive. With S40 inside, the D-pad is a five-way key. Unlike the most basic of Nokia phones, it has a confirming center button. A press and hold on the * key brings up the SIM management menu. The 12 keys of the keypad are decently big but rather flat. There are two big nubs around the 5 key, which does help with touch orientation somewhat. Still, the Nokia C2-01, a single-SIM handset, which we have reviewed, had a much more comfortable keyboard. The right side of the Nokia C2-00 is the most interesting bit of the hardware. It holds the classic round charger plug, the microUSB port (which disappointingly cannot be used for charging) and the second SIM card slot, covered by a plastic flap. The 3.5mm audio jack is stationed on top of the phone, for easy access. To the left is the lanyard eyelet and, at the bottom, there's the mouthpiece. That's it, there is no volume rocker, nor a dedicated camera key – the D-pad is used instead. Rearside are the large hole of the VGA fixed-focus camera lens and the loudspeaker grill. The glass above the camera is exposed to scratches, but it's part of the back cover so we guess, it can easily be changed if it gets too damaged. Under the back cover lies the battery, with the microSD card slot on the side. You have to remove the back cover to access the card slot, but it's not too much of a hassle. Cards of up to 32GB are supported, so storage is limited by your budget only. The battery is a 1020 mAh BL-5C battery that is rated at up to 19 days of standby. The C2-00 will give you up to 5 hours 45 minutes of talk time, according to the manufacturer. That's pretty good for having two active cards on standby, but the C2-01 offered much better talk time on the same battery so we guess the C2-00 batter life estimates are fair with double the number of SIM cards inside. Underneath the battery is a regular SIM slot with a metal hinge that keeps the SIM card in place. There's no way to hot-swap this SIM card, just the second one. The back of the Nokia C2-00 is made of nice matte plastic which, although not luxurious, does its job well. The glossy plastic of the front is less pleasant, but not a deal breaker either. The phone has a simple, sturdy build so it should take quite a bit of beating before it throws in the towel. The rounded shape allows comfortable grip, the phone is quite a bit on the thick side though. Here's a size comparison with the other new dual-SIM, dual-standby handset by Nokia.Unboxing the C2-00
What's in the Nokia C2-00 boxNokia C2-00 360-degree spin
The Nokia C2-00 has classic Nokia looks with smooth rounded corners. The design language is well familiar to most users. The phone measures 108 x 45 x 14.7 mm and weighs 74g. A chubby one indeed, but compact enough to comfortably carry around. Design and construction
C2-00’s display is rather poor
The keypad and navigation deck
Well-connected: microUSB port, card slot and 3.5 mm audio jack
The camera lens and loudspeaker grill at the back • the battery and the SIM bed under the rear cover
Nokia C2-01 held in hand
Nokia C2-00 vs. X1-01 size comparison
Dual-SIM calling
The Nokia C2-00 comes with a typical S40 phonebook, which means plenty of storage for contacts (1000 on the phone plus as many as you can fit on both SIMs) and you can choose how contacts are displayed (with contact photo, by first or last name).
Unfortunately, that also means no smart dialing but you do get search in the phone book. The phonebook can be set up to automatically store new contacts in a chosen location (phone, SIM1, SIM2) or to always ask.
It's a similar situation with making a call - you can pick a default SIM card with which to call, or have the phone ask every time. A press and hold on the * key brings up that menu, so you can switch the default SIM before making a call.
No smart dialing • choosing preferred SIM
What we missed here is the ability to assign each number for the contact to a given SIM. Say one of your contacts has a number with your home network and another with a different provider. You have to remember which SIM to use for each number. Even picking a default SIM for the default number for the contact would have been enough.
The ability to name SIM cards can be quite helpful here. Once the default SIM has been set (it's highlighted on the homescreen so you always know), the only way to dial using the other SIM is through the SIM card management menu.
Other than that, the Nokia C2-00 performs just like any other low-end Nokia S40 phone does, just in double. The second SIM card can be swapped out in seconds, so you can easily use more than two cards for calling.
In-call sound was loud and clear and the reception was solid - we didn’t experience any dropped calls. The only downside of the C2-00 is that both its GSM radios are dual-band only - the 900/1800 bands are pretty wide spread, but they don’t give you world-wide coverage.
Something to keep in mind is that if you're in a call on one SIM card, incoming calls to the second SIM will get a message that your phone is switched off, rather than getting a "busy" message.
One odd thing about the Nokia C2-00 was that during a call, the in-call sound can be heard coming out of the loudspeaker, even when the loudspeaker wasn't on. It was quiet and not very noticeable, but it's still a strange thing to do.
Browsing the phonebook • Dexter's details • Making a call
Another thing (though not strictly a downside) is that the Nokia C2-00 requires a SIM card in the master slot in order for the secondary card to work. Odd but not really limiting.
We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the Nokia C2-00. The loudspeaker posted a Good result with very consistent readings for both voice and music audio.
| Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Pink noise/ Music, dB | Ringing phone, dB | Overal score |
| Nokia E72 | 65.7 | 60.2 | 66.3 | Below Average |
| Nokia X2-01 | 70.2 | 65.5 | 71.8 | Average |
| Nokia C2-01 | 72.8 | 66.0 | 79.7 | Good |
| Nokia C2-00 | 73.0 | 68.9 | 73.3 | Good |
| Nokia X3-02 | 75.1 | 66.6 | 75.7 | Good |
| Nokia C3 | 75.8 | 66.6 | 77.5 | Very Good |
| Nokia X2 | 80.2 | 75.7 | 84.7 | Excellent |
Software overview
The Nokia C2-00 is a S40 6th edition device. The Active standby is the trademark homescreen layout. If you’ve ever used a Nokia phone, you should be familiar with it by now.
It divides the screen into tiles that can be scrolled with the D-pad and edited as you see fit. They can be rearranged but the default layout is the most logical.
The general indicators are on top, featuring date, time and missed events.
The S40 Homescreen • Preferred SIM selected
Pressing the end key while the keypad is locked displays a lockscreen showing the time and date.
The main menu can be viewed in the traditional Grid, List or Single view modes. The left button is assigned to the Go To function by default, which brings up a list of shortcuts (you can choose which ones go up there), so that accessing the most common features is easy.
Main menu
Also, as a Series 40 device, the Nokia C2-00 will run Java apps so you can extend the inbuilt functionality. The Java version of Facebook's app is a good place to start.
The Nokia C2-00 handles messaging without a problem, though with no fanfare either. The supported formats are SMS, MMS, flash and audio messages and the phone handles email too. The keyboard of the C2-00 will give you reasonable typing speed. It’s a good package in terms of software support too, with Nokia Messaging and Ovi Chat enabled.
Nokia C2-00 messaging app
The email client does pretty well to meet most user needs. It works with POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4 protocols and supports multiple email accounts. The email client supports SSL, which enables it to handle a Gmail account for example.
C2-00 handles emails too
The gallery can be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode. In landscape mode, images load full screen. Photos can be organized into albums, viewd in a timeline (they are ordered by the date they were taken) and sorted by date, name or size. Slideshows with selectable transition effects are also an option.
Portrait mode • Landscape mode • Timeline view
As for the regular Gallery app, it’s still here – but it’s hidden in the Applications menu. It’s quite a capable file manager, especially for a feature phone. It can manage folders and files – both one by one and in bulk.
The regular Gallery app acts as the phone's file browser
The music player of the Nokia C2-00 has a solid set of features including a fair number of supported formats. The player handles MP3, WMA, WAV and eAAC+. Tracks can be filtered by artist, album and genre. Naturally, the A2DP profile is supported, allowing Bluetooth streaming of stereo sound. There's adjustable equalizer however.
The music player • Sorting by artist • Music player interface
An RDS-enabled FM radio is available on the Nokia C2-00 as well and it can play through the powerful loudspeaker.
For the record, the Nokia C2-00 supports MP4, H.264, H.263 and 3GP. Let’s face it, watching a movie on this small low-res display is not exactly our idea of fun. Playing an occasional clip someone sent you via MMS is as much use as this player might be getting.
Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, and you get pause and skip buttons.
The Video player menu • Viewing a clip in portrait and in landscape
The Opera Mini 4.2 browser comes preloaded on the C2-00. It’s long been part of the standard S40 package: a good data-efficient choice. The Opera Mini browser supports multiple tabs and the compression notably improves loading time and saves on data charges.
For example, GSMArena.com clocks in at about 370KB through Nokia’s S40 browser and just under 70KB through Opera Mini. Keep in mind you have only EDGE to work with and a proper data plan will cost as much as the phone itself.
The Opera Mini 4.2 interface The Nokia C2-00 audio output isn't by any means spectacular, but it's probably more than you can expect, given the price tag. The phones does pretty well when connected to an external amplifier (such as your home or car stereo) and it's among the loudest devices we have seen. When you plug in a pair of headphones there's notable increase in intermodulation distrotion and stereo crosstalk, while the volume levels drop rapidly. However, you are still left with a decent output so in general we can say we are pretty pleased with the C2-00. Check out the table and see for yourself.
Decent audio quality
| Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
| Nokia C2-00 | +0.18, -0.48 | -83.2 | 83.1 | 0.054 | 0.068 | -81.3 |
| Nokia C2-00 (headphones attached) | +0.31, -0.43 | -78.9 | 83.2 | 0.055 | 0.438 | -67.0 |
| Nokia C2-01 | +0.03 -0.15 | -87.3 | 87.3 | 0.0062 | 0.051 | -88.8 |
| Nokia C2-01 (headphones attached) | +0.95 -7.32 | -86.5 | 72.0 | 0.065 | 2.002 | -65.5 |
| Nokia X2-01 | +0.07 -0.56 | -83.8 | 83.8 | 0.010 | 0.024 | -83.8 |
| Nokia X2-01 (headphones attached) | +0.63 -0.37 | -81.7 | 84.0 | 0.028 | 0.280 | -64.2 |
| Nokia X2 | +0.10 -0.87 | -85.7 | 85.6 | 0.0100 | 0.021 | -85.6 |
| Nokia X2 (headphones attached) | +0.56 -0.64 | -85.6 | 85.5 | 0.014 | 0.314 | -58.3 |
| Nokia C3-01 | +0.08 -0.46 | -88.4 | 88.4 | 0.0087 | 0.022 | -88.1 |
| Nokia C3-01 (headphones attached) | +0.55 -0.29 | -88.3 | 88.3 | 0.014 | 0.404 | -45.0 |
| Nokia X3-02 | +0.04 -0.15 | -63.2 | 64.0 | 0.051 | 0.134 | -61.0 |
| Nokia X3-02 (headphones attached) | +0.56 -0.17 | -63.6 | 63.6 | 0.061 | 0.413 | -50.4 |
You can find more info about the testing process here. The Nokia C2-00 comes with a fixed-focus VGA camera that takes photos with maximum resolution of 640x480. There are options for white balance, several effects and a self timer. There's little point in talking about image quality, besides saying it's awful. The lens has great issues with corner softness, barely leaving the center of the photo with some scrap of sharpness. Anyway, here are a few camera samples to give you an idea of what we're dealing with. The video camera is limited to QCIF@10fps, which makes them usable for MMS only and practically nothing else. Here’s a video sample. Nokia have always been on top of things in the organizer department. The Calendar is the full-featured app we should all be familiar with by now. It has month, week, and day modes and five types of events to set up. The alarm clock is repeatable: it can be set to go off on any selected day of the week, even when the phone is switched off. The other organizing features available include a voice recorder with a 60-minute limit, a stopwatch and a countdown timer. The Nokia C2-00 calculator offers two versions - basic and advanced. In addition, a loan calculator is also available. The consistently useful unit converter tops the list of additional applications. The Nokia C2-00 also includes a Dictionary app (our unit had an English-Chinese dictionary). The Expense Manager is potentially very useful: it allows you to keep a list of expenses (including recurring monthly expenses) in various currencies and it has various viewing modes (daily, monthly, budget and category). The main virtue of the Nokia C2-00 is undoubtedly its rock bottom price. And we mean mobile phones in general, not just dual-SIMs. For the little cash you spend, the C2-00 tries to offer all-round features and does it with varying success. The camera for one is barely a step up from not having a camera at all and we were disappointed by the lack of quad-band connectivity (not to mention 3G). Still, with support for huge microSD cards and a powerful loudspeaker, the Nokia C2-00 can save you some cash by taking the place of a basic MP3 player. The phone offers the traditionally feature-rich Series 40 experience, though it carries its flaws too – such as the lack of smart dialing, an office document viewer or some UI animations, for that matter. But since we're getting the same treatment as on pricier S40 models, we're not going to hold that one against the C2-00. The ultimate question though is, what else you can get that fits the "cheap, dual-SIM, dual-standby" bill. Well, the Nokia X1-01 is about as low as you can go - it drops the arguably useful VGA camera and it's a S30 phone, so no Java apps. However, it may be even better value for money than the C2-00. You can also wait for the much fancier Nokia C2-06/C2-03. With a 2.6" QVGA touchscreen, it's closer to mid-range feature phones than the C2-00. It doesn’t have Wi-Fi though (unlike some of the other touch-enabled S40 handsets), which would have been a major perk. Then comes a handful of Samsung offerings. The Samsung E2152 adds Twitter and Facebook integration to the C2-00 recipe, plus a flashlight. The Samsung Ch@t 222 builds on that with a QWERTY keyboard, while the Samsung E2652 Champ Duos goes full touch (and there's the Wi-Fi enabled E2652W version too). A slightly higher-end offering, the Samsung C6112 is a slider with 2.4" QVGA screen, 2MP camera and DNSe. This is by no means the full list - go to our Advanced search tool and look up "dual sim", You can set other preferences to narrow down the alternatives that are most suitable to you. Mobile phones are a necessity in today's world - being always reachable, being able to reach others all the time is no luxury anymore. It's with phones like the C2-00 that Nokia does so well on emerging markets. The Finns obviously know how to cater to small budgets. Going dual-SIM gives greater flexibility and allows users to cut phone bills to the bare minimum.
Nokia C2-00 frequency response graphFixed-focus VGA camera
Nokia C2-00 camera samplesOrganizer and apps
The Calendar application
The Alarm application • Voice recorder • Stopwatch
The Calculator • The Unit converter
Dictionary app • Expense ManagerFinal words
Nokia X1-01 • Nokia C2-06
Samsung E2152 • Samsung Ch@t 222 • Samsung E2652 Champ Duos
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