The Nokia C7 is now shipping to customers according to an official press release. This comes less than 2 weeks after the news that the N8 started to ship, meeting the planned deadline of “Q3 2010” by the narrowest of margins. Unlike the N8 however, the C7 was announced less than a month ago, on September 14th, making this one of the quickest turn arounds I’ve ever seen of a Nokia device.
Specifications for those who may have forgotten: 3.5 inch screen, 640 x 360 pixel resolution, comes with 8 GB of memory inside, has an 8 megapixel camera, is “only” 10.5 mm thin (iPhone 4 is 9.4 mm), has 3G 850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz support and 2G 850/900/1800/1900 MHz support. The 3G is capable of 10.2 Mbps down and 2.0 Mbps up. There’s also 802.11n WiFi, GPS, 3.5 mm headphone jack, and the battery is user replaceable.
Why would someone go for the C7 over the N8? Well … the camera may not be that important to a user, or they’re looking to save a few Euros, or they simply prefer the slimmer design, but this writer wonders why these two devices are priced within 60 EUR of each other and that with the exception of the camera, they really are the exact same device. We’ve got some hands-on time with the device, with video, and we walked away rather let down. It isn’t the C7’s fault, she’s a pretty device with a body made out of stainless steel; it’s Symbian^3, which we thought would be in a more advanced state than what it is right now. It used to be that we had a few writers here using Nokia devices, but now it’s all Android, iPhone and of course the BlackBerry Brothers Simon and James.
There’s always the Nokia N9, due to be announced at the first ever MeeGo conference scheduled to take place in a little over a month. Now that Peter Skillman, one of the brains behind webOS, is working on the MeeGo team, all our attention is on that operating system.