Nokia Asha 200 – User Review

The Nokia Asha 200 is a dual-SIM messenger phone from the Finnish giant, mainly targetting youngsters around the world. This QWERTY phone has all the right features to catch your attention. I was looking for a trendy yet reasonably priced phone because my college life had just started 3 weeks ago. Among style and price, the other things I looked out for are battery backup, build quality and multimedia capabilities, mainly music. From my experiance, I must tell you that this phone is perfect bang for your buck. Read on to find out more .

What's in the box?

Contents of the package

The cover and the box of the Nokia 200 is very minimalistic in size and design. The box contains the phone neatly wrapped in a plastic cover with the usual set of Nokia accessories, i.e. battery, charger, user guide and the headset. The new charger looks compact and sturdy.

Phone - Hardware 

The Asha 200 along with the package

This dual-SIM dual-standby phone with a screen size of 2.4 inches supports an external memory card of up to 32 GB. Other features include FM radio with recording, standard 3.5mm AV connector, Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0 and EDGE/GPRS support .

The dimensions of the phone are 11.54 x 6.11 x 1.4 cm.

The phone fits just right in the hand

The phone feels comfortable in your hand and fits inside pockets - shirts or jeans - comfortably. Below the 2.4-inch display, there are six keys and the D-pad. The outer ring of the Navi is used for navigation and has a silver lining throughout its edge. There are two keys on both sides in silver, used for Options and Back. Overall, this combination looks very sexy on the black Nokia Asha 200 .

Slots on one side of the phone, protected by a flap

There are four buttons near the Scroll key (Navi) and the top left button is used as a dual-SIM Manager. This is a pure waste of space as once used and corresponding settings are saved, no one is required to press this button again. There is no option for changing it to assign it with another function. The top right key can be assigned with functions like Mail, Chat , Social, Create message, Conversations, Inbox and Names or can be left "functionless".

MicroUSB port and audio connector

The QWERTY keypad of this phone looks a little small when compared to that of the Nokia X2-01. But this phone’s keypad is better designed, so after two days of usage, you won’t hit the wrong keys. The design of the keys looks as if it is smiling at us. The regular inputs are shown in white, whereas the numbers and special symbols are shown in orange colour. This combination is easy on the eyes.

SIM card in place

The glossy front panel attracts fingerprints too much; and this is very evident if we place the phone in the sunlight.The left side of the phone doesn’t have any button and the right side has the SIM slot and memory card slot. There is nothing at the bottom too. The top side is occupied by a USB connector, charger connector, the headset connector and a wrist strap holder, too.

The battery in view

Now coming to battery, the device is powered by Nokia BL-5J with 1430 mAh. The company claims a talktime of 7 hours and standy time of 890 hours with one SIM only, while with dual SIM the standby time is 570 hours. My opinion in this battery department is very good. The handset lasted for 4 days with almost 1.5 to 2 hours of calls per day, 50+ SMS daily, playing music for 45 minutes and web-surfing occasionally. So I think it's pretty good.

Phone - Software

Nokia 200 is powered by Nokia Asha Series 40 OS, a customised version of Series 40 as seen on the Asha series. As far as I am concerned, Nokia brings one of the best user-friendly interfaces, and the same applies for Asha 200’s interface too. Still, the original S40 had its advantages too.

Cons

The device doesn’t support streaming, so you can’t play videos directly, even though there are apps that help you download YouTube videos and all.

When we press the END key during music playback , the music player automatically stops; to listen to music and do some tasks simultaneously, you need to go to options, then select Play in Background

Interesting Stuff

If you have any “Missed Calls” or “Unread Messages”, the keypad automatically blinks to grab your attention after every 40-50 seconds .

Disclaimer for User Reviews

Reviews written by non-tech2 staff are to be considered as personal opinions based on actual experiences by users themselves. Ratings depicted  are purely user based scores and are in no way a  reflection on tech2’s own rating mechanism. Tests  are conducted by users and their scores are gathered  through their own means with no involvement from tech2 in any way.