By now, you may have already read my first impressions and watched the unboxing video, so it’s now time to jump in and see and read what the hardware part is all about.

The X3-02 as you all know, is the first Touch and Type S40, so in a way, it had to be appealing, if at all the whole Touch and Type concept had to take off. Well, looking at the device, it’s pretty slick. The hardware quality is trademark Nokia – although there’s a lot of plastic used, it’s not the cheap quality type which many others use even in their high end devices.

It’s a small, lightweight, cool looking device. So light that I had to keep a constant check on my pocket if it was still in there! Chances are you’ll lose it and still not notice it!

The upper half of the screen is covered by the 2.4″ TFT resistive (holy cow!) touchscreen. It is of QVGA resolution (320×240), and supports upto 256k colours. The colours are good, the screen is far more responsive compared to the older touchscreen Nokias. But, this cannot/should not be compared to the capacitive units out there. Coming to sunlight legibility, as with many touchscreens out there, this one too fails to impress me. If you want to read anything, you’ll have to use the other hand to reduce the amount of light reflecting on the screen. The haptic feedback is one of the best across competition.

Below the screen lies the numpad. The top row has the call receive and end key on either sides, with the Messaging and Music Player shortcuts in the middle. These buttons are quite good, with a good distinctive press from the rest of the numpad, so you’ll know when you’re pressing the wrong one! The rest of the numpad is not in the usual configuration, with the *, # and 0 keys pushed to the extreme right column. It’s just like what you’ll find on the QWERTY Nokias (E63, E71..). Overall, the keypad (numpad) is pretty easy to use, and I’ll rank it 3rd after the E52′s and the E71′s. That’s an achievement in itself for a S40 device! The keypad lighting is, again, trademark Nokia. It’s a petty thing, but it does matter a lot if you tend to text a lot.

On the right side, there’s the volume rocker and the ‘Lock’ button. On it’s lower end, you’ll find one of the two latches to remove the battery cover, with the other one resting on the left side.

The left side is pretty bare, what with the second battery cover latch being the only thing present.

The top of the X3-02 houses all the connectivity options – the 3.5mm audio jack, the microUSB slot and the charging slot. A couple of things you may want to read are that the X3-02 can be charged using the USB cable, connected to the computer, and that there’s USB On-The-Go support! The latter part is interesting isn’t it!

The bottom of the device houses the mouthpiece and the loudspeakers as well. The loudspeakers are somewhat textured like a Golf Ball, so that adds to the looks of this li’l beauty.

On the back lies the 5 MP camera, a Fixed Focus unit. The stills aren’t that…..impressive. More on this later.

The power source, the battery, is a 860 mAh Li-ion one. Considering the overall size of the device, I don’t think a bigger one could be used. This has it’s disadvantage too – the X3-02 won’t last you a day. It is quoted at 5.5 hours on 2G usage, and 3.5 hours on 3G.

Coming to the end of this part, I’d like to emphasize on the fact that the build quality and the Touch and Type thing will be the two selling points. Throw in the 5 MP camera too, but it desperately needed to be coupled with Flash and shouldv’e atleast been EDoF (I’m quite a fan of this tech!). The average user could’ve clicked some pretty good pics if it’d be EDoF. Well anyways, I think you should continue and read on the next part where I’ll take a look at the software part.

Stay Hooked!