Mobile circuit and guide

The Nokia Asha 300 may not exactly fit in with today’s standards of newsworthy. With smartphones flexing their muscles at venues like CES, sporting ever-expanding app markets, HD screens and multi-core processors, it’s hard to see how an entry-level offering could produce much of a splash.

If, however, price is a factor, or you simply want a phone that is…well, simple, then the Asha 300 could definitely make some waves in your pool. Part of a new line of phones by Nokia, which feature a revamped S40 interface and 1GHz processor, the Asha 300, and its QWERTY sibling, the Asha 303, aim to cement Nokias place in a market they have traditionally dominated.

The Touch and Type S40 interface is at once the same yet different from the traditional non-smart UI from Nokia. Combined with an app store and a customizable homescreen, there are definitely elements borrowed from smartphones in an attempt by Nokia to extend the functionality while retaining the simplistic feel of the S40. The faster processor and 128MB of RAM are more than sufficient to run the S40 quickly and without hitches.

Key features

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
Quad-band 3G with 10Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
Asha S40 Touch and Type platform
2.4" QVGA 256K-color resistive TFT touchscreen
1GHz processor
128MB RAM, 256MB ROM
5 megapixel fixed-focus camera
VGA video recording at 30fps
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Bluetooth v2.1 (with A2DP)
Standard microUSB port (charging enabled)
USB On-The-Go support
microSD card slot (32 GB supported)
3.5mm audio jack
Asha exclusive Angry Birds game

Main disadvantages

No Wi-Fi (as opposed to Asha 303)
No multitasking
Fixed-focus camera
No smart dialing
No video-call camera
Non-hot-swappable memory card
The Asha 300 walks that fine precipice between designing a phone that is contemporary, yet aims to appeal mainly to an audience where being contemporary is not as important as being simple and not too expensive.

We’ve all heard the expression “I just want a phone that works, dont care about the extra stuff.” With quad-band 2G and 3G support, the 300 does exactly that – it’s a no-nonsense worker bee of a phone. In fact, with Bluetooth, a 5MP camera, messaging and radio it will do even more should the need arise. The only ding in regards to important cost-cutting features is that it does not have the Wi-Fi support of the Asha 303.

All of this in mind, one of the main disadvantages of not having a smartphone is that you dont get multitasking. Save for being able to play music in the background, the Asha 300 will not be able to run multiple applications simultaneously.

Asha is the new name of Nokias entry level phone lineup. The Asha 303, which we recently reviewed, succeeds the Nokia C3. The Asha 300 in turn is an obvious descendant of the C3-01. Interestingly, while the QWERTY-enabled Asha 303 upgrades its predecessor in almost every way, the Asha 300 looks and feels like a downgrade. That should make it even more affordable, but lets see what you get relative to what you pay for.

As Nokias Symbian hardware development comes to an end, its long awaited "Game Changer" device has finally hit the UK streets with its killer camera.

Although the Nokia N8 has long held the crown of the Finnish firms best camera phone available, the Nokia 808 PureView has arrived with its 41MP camera.

The amount of hardware required to support its functionality causes the Nokia 808 PureView to weigh in at a hefty 169g - compared with the 140g iPhone 4S, 133g Samsung Galaxy S3 and 130g HTC One X.



As well as its weight, the Nokia 808 PureView - with its 4" AMOLED ClearBlack display - isnt exactly small measuring 123.9mm x 60.2mm x 13.9mm (expanding to 17.95mm at the camera bulge) compared with the slim iPhone 4S (9.3mm), One X (8.9mm) and S3 (8.6mm).

The Nokia 808 Pureview looks and feels like the old Nokia 5800 with a hint of the more recent Nokia Lumia 610 although both were smaller, more compact, flat-backed phones.



Although the 5800 and Lumia 610 appeared a little cheap in appearance, which was reflected in their purchase price, this is not the case for the Nokia 808 PureView with its £500 pricetag (black £519.99 or white £489.99).



The main reason for this high retail price is that none of the UK operators have decided to offer the Nokia 808 PureView, meaning that it is only available via Amazon at the SIM free, unbranded price.

Although this seems a high price to pay for a phone, when you compare it with the iPhone 4S 16GB the 808 Purview is pretty much the same, although the HTC One X weighs in 10 percent cheaper than both Nokias and Apples offering.

The Nokia 808 PureView uses Symbian Belle Feature Pack 1 (FP1) as its backbone operating system (OS) which is the latest incarnation of the Symbian^3 platform which initially released on the Nokia N8 and is based on many years of Symbian development.



As with Symbian Belle you can add an extra two Homescreens to the default 4 user configurable screens, or delete them to reduce down to the minimum of one.

Transitions between landscape and portrait screen orientation, when the phone is rotated, are a little more polished in the latest Belle FP1 OS, with the screen image zooming out slightly when rotating, and then expanding in its new orientation.

When it comes to homescreen widgets, the Nokia 808 PureView comes well stocked, out of the box, with 46 widget options once the Social and Maps apps have been updated and the Microsoft Office apps have been installed via Software Update.

These include clock, calendar, contacts and mail options as well as; four Social App options (Social app, Facebook, Facebook Summary and Twitter), five Maps Suite options, six media related options plus a whole host of others for you to play around with.



With so many widgets on offer, you may be a little disappointed that youre limited to just six homescreens, as you could easily fill more than that if you wished.

There is a useful Mobile Data Tracker which displays either the total amount of mobile data used since resetting counters, or the ability to set it to display the amount of data allowance remaining in a user defined period.

The Nokia Recommends widget is really just a full width app icon, wasting screen real estate which opens the namesake app providing lists of the top albums and tracks which can be purchased from the Nokia Music Store.

Although Symbian Anna and Belle brought a more Android-looking OS, the major disappointment for long standing Symbian users is that whilst Apple finally acknowledged the advantage of folders in the Main Menu, Nokia has reduced this same functionality removing folder in folder support in the Main Menu structure.



The initial out of the box appearance of the main menu has all apps in a flat structure which can be either user "arranged" or automatically sorted in alphabetical order via either a long press in the main window or tapping on the menu button (bottom right).

A further disappointment is that all folders have the same basic icon making it harder to differentiate at a glance.

Luckily two third party apps are available from the Nokia Store to counter this, in the form of FolderIcon and Thumbnail Folders which enable the user to assign their own folder icons or replace the folder icons with new icons showing thumbnails generated from the apps contained within.

Another function we miss on Windows Phone and iOS is the profile support provided on Symbian, which can be automated by installing the third party Situations apps from the Nokia Store enabling automatic switching between profiles including silencing the Nokia 808 PureView at night and switching on/off Power Save mode.

But additional to this simple example, a number of phone settings (Profile switching, Mobile Data toggle, WiFi toggle, BT toggle, Power Save toggle, SMS reply and App lauching) can be switched based on time, calendar events, connectivity (WiFi/BT) or location (Cell Tower/GPS).