Nokia is big player in manufacturing low to mid-budget feature phone. The company has launched Asha Series with smartphone like features in mid August.
The Asha 311 has got decent body with a price tag of Rs. 7,089.
The Box:
The Box comes with Asha 311 cell phone, a pair of earphones, a wall charger and a manual.
Body and Design:
The Nokia Asha 311 has quite attractive and improved design. The little Candybar phone is built from a plastic and is all glossy from the back. The Asha 311 measures 4.17 x 2.05 x 0.51 inches and weighs about 95 grams. The phone has good design curved edges and no sharp corners on the body. There is stainless steel strip between the screen and keypad (There are two keys, to receive call and to end a call) of the phone.
The Asha 311 sports 3-inch full capacitive touch display. The touch of the phone is really great. This display has been manufactured using a layer of Gorilla Glass on the top of the screen to protect it from scratches.
On the back there’s a 3.2MP camera to photo and video shooting. Inside we’ve 1110 mAh battery, SIM card slot and a microSD card slot. The bottom of the phone have a matte finish.
The microphone is located under the steel strip and on the right there are volume keys with a lock/sleep button below. The phone lacks dedicated camera button. The top of Asha 311 has 3.5mm jack, 2.5mm charging pin and a microUSB port.
The overall body look of the phone is great and the device is seemed to be focused at the young crowd.
Hardware:
Asha 311 offers 156 ppi pixel density on 3-inch display. The low power LCD panel makes colors appear slightly washed out. The display has proximity sensor located at the top-right. The device also packs an orientation sensor to automatically rotate the interface.
The Asha 311 has polarization filter which provides better display under sunlight/bright light. Not many phones provide similar feature to work under the sun.
The Nokia Asha 311 features 1GHz ARM 11 mobile processor, 128 MB RAM and 256MB dedicated ROM for the Software. The Mobile comes with 2GB microSD memory card and has 140 MB internal storage. The phone supports upto 32GB microSD card storage.
OS and Software:
Nokia has modified its S40 OS to run on touch devices. The OS has been influenced by Meego OS and Swipe function from Nokia N9. It also offers three screens to the whole UI – Lockscreen that has a single color background, a shortcut screen where select icons can be added for quick access and the application drawer. It also offers pull-down notification tray.
The mobile provides quite a lot of options for music lovers. The notification tray has shortcut for opening music player. The device comes with eight tracks pre-loaded.
The smartphone also comes with essential pre-loaded apps like whatsApp Nokia Chat, Nokia Life Tools, Nokia newsreader (RSS) and Nokia Social that includes Facebook and Twitter.
The famous Angry Birds comes preloaded with some other games. Nokia has joined with Electronic Arts to provide about 40 games for free through the EA Games Gift app.
The phone does not have GPS chip but offers Nokia Maps which uses cell-based triangulation to lock location.
Multimedia:
The Nokia Asha 311 is made for avid music lovers. The speaker at the back provides clean and loud music. The music player comes with equalizer presets. You can always plug-in your favourite headphone into 3.5mm audio port. The phone features FM radio with RDS and a simple user interface. You can store stations and jump between them with dedicated buttons.
There is a built-in photo editor that allows very basic tasks like cropping. Video playback is possible through the gallery but there is no scroll-bar.
Camera:
Nokia has not provided dedicated camera key and hence using camera quickly might be a bit issue. The 3.2MP camera does not provide great image also it takes a second more to capture image. The camera can record about 1.5 hours of video and the dedicated video app comes with a number of features to adjust lighting, exposure, and effects -Sepia, Negative, Grayscale and Normal.
Battery:
The Asha 311 packs 3.7v battery packing 1110 mAh power which provides upto 40 hours of music play. If you’re using 3G to check your facebook or other sites, it’ll provide a battery backup upto a day which is quite enough and you could charge your phone at night. When on 2G mode the phone provides a standby time of about a month.
Conclusion:
The Nokia Asha 311 is a mobile phone targeted to students and to people who want to have secondary phone with good music capabilities. The MRP of the device is Rs. 7089 on the box, Flipkart is selling it for Rs. 6430. The Asha 311 is a great performer and is reportedly in high demand in India. But there are lot of smartphones out there, even you can get Android smartphone (and even a tablet!) for the similar price.
If you’ve bought the device, please let us know what you think of the Asha 311 in the comments section below.
Samsung Galaxy S IV to come with dual-SIM feature