Nokia X3 Touch and Type - Review

“The Nokia X3’s merger of touchscreen and keypad makes it ideal for intermittent mobile web users and everyday typists. The X3’s also a decent cameraphone, but otherwise lacks many decent features”

A keypad candybar with touchscreen

The X3's touchscreen and keypad combo is great

The Nokia X3 Touch and Type may look like any bog-standard Nokia, but the phone actually hides a cunning technological secret: a touch-sensitive screen integrated above a physical keypad.

Mixing the two is unheard of on other phones of the X3’s size and shape, yet I quickly grew to like the combination.

Similar quality phones without touchscreens - such as the Sony Ericsson Elm - force you to surf webpages by manually clicking through hyperlinks.

The X3’s touchscreen put the internet at my fingertips - quite literally, letting me scroll from the top to the bottom of a news website in a much faster time.

A small on-screen vibration ("Haptic Touch") also let me know exactly what I’d tapped on - handy for webpages with tiny hyperlinks.

When it came to replying to emails and texts, the X3’s physical alpha-numeric keypad was large enough to manually tap out responses in record time.

X3 Touch and Type(lilac) £0.00

500 min 5000 texts

£23.00

The quality of the X3’s touchscreen isn’t great though, often bowing around my fingertips, causing a momentary on-screen colour distortion. More expensive touchscreen phones, such as the iPhone 4 and Nokia N8, have more durable glass displays.

A bit lacking in features

Available in lots of colours

Look past this minor imperfection and you soon see that the Nokia X3 is a well constructed phone - it has a metal battery cover, for example.

Nokia hasn’t equipped the X3 with many other high-end features, with the 5Mp cameraphone being it’s only other feature of much significance

The camera captured some decent images and I liked the limited range of tools for further adjusting the quality of my photographs, such as “colour time effect” and white balance. The 4x digital zoom was also handy.

But the X3’s lack of a camera flash rules the phone out as a nocturnal photographer.

A physical camera shortcut button would also have been nice - the only physical shortcuts available are for messages and the music player. You can, as a halfway house, stick four of your favourite apps to the X3’s onscreen menu.

Music is easily moved onto and off the X3’s removable memory card by plugging the phone into your PC over a USB connection.

A 3.5mm jack on the phones top means you can use your own headphones, but the speaker covertly integrated into the X3’s bottom end is surprisingly powerful.

Build quality is pretty good

Nice pictures from the 5Mp camera

Call quality was consistently good on the X3: calls didn’t drop and I could hear my caller while walking through noisy London streets. Bluetooth support also meant I could use a wireless Bluetooth headset for telephone calls and music.

Battery life usually matched the X3’s specifications: some 300 minutes of talk-time life and around 430 hours on standby.

It was hard to tell if the X3’s unique touchscreen/keypad arrangement shortened the battery life - as compared to a more basic Nokia - but it’s something you should bear in mind.

Find your perfect Nokia X3 package

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