Nokia unveils cheap but smarter phones - Asha 200, 201, 300, 303

Nokia unveils four new phone hardware under the banner 'Asha' derived from Hindi meaning Hope. The Asha series is made up of four feature phones running on Nokia’s entry-level Series 40 platform. S40 devices aren’t as smartphones, but are more like those pre-iPhone and even pre-Nokia N95 handsets that strictly dealt with the basics.

Nokia Asha 300
The Nokia Asha 300 (pictured centre) is a phone that closely resembles what you might have been using back in 2005. It’s a candybar phone with an old skool 12-button keypad for tapping out texts with multiple presses. The key touch of modernity here is the 2.4-inch screen, which is touch-sensitive (albeit resistive).

The Asha 300 will come with a decent 5-megapixel camera and a microSD card slot for memory expansion (it only comes with 140MB as standard).

Nokia Asha 200 & 201
Next on the list is the Nokia Asha 200 (pictured right) and its close brother the 201. The Asha 200 is a BlackBerry-style phone with a portrait-view qwerty keyboard. Its most notable features are a whopping 32GB of internal memory and a neat dual-SIM fast boot mode, which means you can run two SIM cards simultaneously. These can be swapped out for others while the phone is on, too.

The Nokia Asha 201 is exactly the same, but comes without the dual-SIM feature.

Nokia Asha 303
We didn’t group this with the Nokia Asha 300 (pictured left) because it really is quite different. The Nokia Asha 303 features a full qwerty keyboard and a 2.6-inch capacitive touchscreen. It also runs on a 1GHz processor. It’s undoubtedly the pick of the Asha range in terms of its components, which wouldn’t look out of place in a mid range smartphone.

The Asha 303 also has a microSD card slot – again making up for a relative lack of internal storage.

Shared features
As already mentioned, the Asha range is intended for developing markets, and this can be seen in some of the shared features. While these are simple and affordable S40 phones at heart, they’re geared towards economies with few fixed internet access points. As such, all have 3G and Wi-Fi capabilities.

The main unifying feature is a Nokia web browser that uses cloud-technology to heavily compress data usage by as much as 90 per cent. This makes accessing the web on each device far less costly on pay as you go contracts.

We may not see the Nokia Asha series in the UK any time soon – if at all – but we can certainly see a place for some of them – particularly the Nokia Asha 303 with its smartphone-like components – in the growing youth market. It’s good to see Nokia addressing both ends of the mobile market with such style.

Source : fonehome.co.uk