Nokia Asha 300 Review

Facebook is present

To make up for this, you do get USB On-the-go support, for what that’s worth. The onboard memory is just 140 MB, so you can’t really do much with it, but you do get a 2GB memory card to help you out. Provision for Facebook and Twitter is present, so you can get your social media fix through this phone. Chat applications, like Nimbuzz can be downloaded from the Ovi Store. There isn’t much variety in terms of apps, but we’ll take what we can get. 

Misc. Applications 

The Asha 300 comes pre-installed with Angry Birds, which isn’t very forgiving on a resistive screen. The game isn’t particularly smooth, despite it having a 1GHz CPU. We feel the problem is the less RAM as 128 MB just isn’t enough for such rich multimedia apps. Other games bundled include Brain Challenge, Climate Mission, Diamond Twistr as well as some utilities like Life Tools, Communities, Converter, Money, etc. 

Some Internet apps

Camera
The camera maybe a 5MP shooter, but the quality of the sensor is quite appalling. It’s bad enough that it’s a fixed focus camera; the sensor isn’t able to pick up any detail or colours accurately. The picture appears fine on the viewfinder, but the final captured image is quite bad.

Really bad sensor

The video recorder can capture videos upto 640 x 480 resolutions, but as you may have guessed, the quality and frame rate isn’t the best. 

Battery Life 

The Asha 300 is fitted with an 1110mAh Li-ion battery, which lasted for about 5hrs in our video drain test, so not the best, but not bad, either. Charging the phone to its full capacity does take quite a while. Our loop tests gave us a slightly better result, since there wasn’t Wi-Fi streaming involved. Here we got 1.5hrs of call time, 2hrs of video and 3hrs of music. 

Verdict 

The Nokia Asha is available for a street price of Rs.7,000; although you can find it for a bit cheaper, if you look online. This is just a ridiculously high price for this phone, all the more, when you can get some very good Android handsets at this price range. The Samsung Galaxy Y, Spice Mi-350n and even the Samsung Wave Y (which is based on Bada 2.0) are all much better alternatives to the Asha 300. Honestly, when the phone first came to our labs, we thought it was under Rs.5,000, since it looks like that sort of handset. Rs.3,000 would be the ideal price for this phone. It may have a 1GHz CPU, but the fact is that power is never fully harnessed and how can you, when you’re using an old Operating System. We guess, even if it was running a 600MHz CPU, you would hardly tell the difference.

The Asha 300 is put together very well and we applaud Nokia for their craftsmanship. 3G support is also a bonus, but besides that there really isn’t anything going for this phone that would make you shell out seven large ones. Like we said, if it drops to 3K, then pick it up without thinking twice.