Nokia Asha 311 Review and Pricing

The Nokia Asha 311 has raised lots of interest especially among the Kenyan youth. With an attractive design and an affordable price tag, Nokia is specifically targeting the emerging Kenyan Smartphone market that was for long monopolized by the Korean Smartphone manufacturer, Samsung Electronics.

Enough of the biz talk, here is an independent review of the phone that is expected to give the rest of the Smartphone brands a serious run for the money.

The first thing that will awe about the Nokia Asha 311 is the lag free smooth user interface on the gorgeous 3-inch capacitive display. The display reminds me a lot of the Samsung Galaxy Y but this time round it is catching to the eye and with brightness that can sting your retinas even when gazing at it in broad daylight… (that’s a great thing by the way!)

Related: Samsung Galaxy Young Review

Unlike most entry-level Smartphones brands, the Nokia Asha 311 display comes coated with corning gorilla glass to keep scratches at bay . This is a first considering that the corning glass display has been for long a privilege of the high-end range of Smartphones.

On to the Nokia Asha 311 chassis, the phone comes with a beautiful 106 x 52 x 12.9 mm body and weighs approximately 95g. The slight thickness of the body gives the phone an awesome quality build and keeps of the annoying creaky moving parts typical of most entry level phones. On the downside, the back glossy cover is a magnet for fingerprint smudges.

Now on to my favorite review aspect; the technical specifications. The phone comes with a processor clocked at 1GHz. The 1 GHz ARM11 makes multi-tasking a breeze on the Nokia Asha 311. Though it comes a little as a disappointment that the phone lacks a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) necessary for 3D gaming and come with  only 128MB of RAM.

The rest of the technical specification details are that of a typical Smartphone i.e Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Push Email etc. Another downside of the Nokia Asha 311 is it lacks a GPS chip that is a standard in most modern Smartphones. For navigation, the phone relies on the Nokia Maps service that uses cell based triangulation rather than GPS (No Google Maps)

Operating System

The phone comes loaded with the Nokia OS. The Nokia OS looks a lot like the Meego software. The OS comes with a smooth swiping UI and pull down notifications for incoming mail and texts. It is worth noting that the software provides an awesome navigation for multimedia that most music lovers will enjoy.

The phone comes with 140 MB of User available internal memory and a memory card slot that can handle up to 32GB of MicroSD memory. The phone comes bundled with a 2GB memory card in the box.

Network & Connectivity

On the connectivity aspect, the phone comes with 3G, Edge and GPRS.  The phone can therefore handle HSDPA and HSUPA networks. The phone also comes with the standard Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n that saves you from the expensive data charges and Bluetooth V 2.1 to handle your wireless file transfers.

On the camera, Nokia Asha 311 comes with a 3.2-megapixel fixed focus camera. The phone lacks an LED flash making it unsuitable for photography in low light settings. The camera shoots 480p video in a 3GP format.

On the multimedia, the phone comes with a well-designed music player that fits perfectly on the 3-inch screen. In addition to its smooth interface, the music player comes with lots of codecs to handle most of the audio file types. The stock video player can handle Avi, MP4 and 3GP files.

With a Li-Ion 1110 mAh standard battery the phone packs in enough juice to get you through a day or two. The fact that it lacks a GPS chip, which is one of the notorious guzzlers of battery juice, allows the Nokia Asha 311 to continue the long battery life legacy that is a characteristic of the Nokia Asha range of phones.

The Nokia Asha 311 specifications and design definitely meets the expectations of the young Smartphone user segment of the market.  With a simple yet well-designed user interface plus the decent battery life, the phone is definitely perfect for a student or a Smartphone user requiring a backup phone.

Nokia Asha 311: [usr 6]

In Kenya the phone is priced at Ksh 9,999 and comes bundled with 40 Free Electronic arts games.