Nokia Asha 302 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia Asha 302 is one of Nokia's newest feature phones, created for the manufacturer's numerous customers in the developing countries. This is a field where Nokia is traditionally very powerful, as its Series 40 platform offers an affordable, yet feature-rich handset experience. However, with recent low-end touchscreen Android models getting dangerously close as far as pricing goes, it would be very interesting to see if the new Asha 302 and its physical QWERTY keyboard would be able to remain relevant on the market.

In the box you'll find:

Design:

Nokia may have lost many battles recently, but it's still a leader when it comes to crafting beautiful handsets. In this particular case, this doesn't mean that the Asha 302 manages to fascinate us with its appearance, but it does mean that it is pleasant to look at. We are testing the dark gray version, which is overly neutral, but when you couple this to the chrome-like elements found on the device, it does make for one good-looking phone.



You can compare the Nokia Asha 302 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Of course, Nokia has remained true to the solid and high-quality build by incorporating a metal back cover. The plastic that has been used for the buttons on the front side is also nice to the touch.

In addition to the 3.5mm headset jack, there are separate charging and microUSB ports, although the microUSB one can be used to charge the phone as well.

The keys of the physical QWERTY keyboard react decently to the touch. However, they are also very small, so in case you have bigger fingers, the typing experience won't be great. Otherwise, the keyboard is OK and will get the job done. It would be best if you try it in-store, before you buy the phone, to make sure that it suits you.

Display:

The screen of the Nokia Asha 302 measures 2.4 inches, and has a resolution of 320x240 pixels. It's not the sharpest-looking panel we've seen, nor is it worst one. Outdoor visibility is so-so, while the viewing angles leave much to be deserved. Still, in a handset of this class, the 2.4” screen of the Asha 302 is more than enough.

Interface and Functionality:

The Nokia Asha 302 is powered by the Series 40 feature phone platform. It's nothing to talk about, really. The manufacturer has done some neat additions to the experience like a home-screen social widget, which lets you do stuff such as update your Facebook status, or see the latest activity. There's also a customizable row of shortcuts at the bottom, which is all OK, but our gripe with this software is how unintuitive it is. More than once we found ourselves wondering which of the available on screen options is currently selected, and which isn't. The colors that have been used just aren't contrasting enough, and at times we observed bugs when the UI was showing more than one option being highlighted.


Not only this, but the software is constantly asking you whether it should do this or that, then it'll ask for a confirmation, then it'll probably ask you about something else... until it finally decides to carry out the command. One such frustrating experience was when we tried to update the Store application. We literally had to choose “OK” about 4-5 times in a row until the app finally started updating itself. Anyways, we don't really think that Nokia's trying to fix this at this point.

The Nokia Asha 302 has a social twist to it. It has a Social app, which lets you log in with Facebook, Twitter, orkut and/or Flickr accounts. Overall, it presents the user with some decent social networking capabilities, although it can't really be called convenient or snappy.


Messaging:

The built-in Mail application should let you quickly set-up an Ovi Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, as well as some local mail service accounts, although we actually had problems getting it to work. Let's just say that it's not the smartest and most intuitive software out there.


Other than that, as we said, the keyboard is good enough to let you comfortably type texts or short mails.

Internet:

The browser of the Asha 302 is very Opera Mini like, although it doesn't work as well. It does present you with a page overview, allowing you to zoom into the area that you're interested in, but it's slower, displays images in a lower quality and struggles with loading some of the pages.


Because of all that, we decided to try installing Opera Mini. We opened the browser for the second time, entered Opera's internet address, hit Enter, and... got the message “No server access”, whatever this should mean. So, we were unable to install Opera Mini. Of course, you can always side-load it, but what we want to do here is to give you an idea of how inconsistent and difficult to figure out this  software can be.

Camera:

There are quite a few settings to tweak the photo-taking experience of the Asha 302, but we don't really think that it's possible to improve the results significantly. All in all, photos are quite sharp, while colors are relatively natural. Inside shots are decent, though there's an above-average level of noise, due to the camera's liking for sharper visuals.



The Asha 302's camera records VGA video, which is OK for a handset of this class, but the 15 FPS rate makes it quite choppy. You can definitely tell what's on screen, but that's it – no fun included.

Nokia Asha 302 Sample Video:



Multimedia:

We're content with the music player app of the Asha 302. In addition to the standard stuff, you can also choose an equalizer preset, or even set you own. The loudspeaker sounds pretty good, and is plenty loud too. The bundled WH-102 earphones are pretty basic, so we'd suggest using some of the equalizer presets in order to refine the sound.


The phone plays DivX, MPEG-4 and Xvid video in up to 640x480 pixels, no luck with H.264. The display looks good, but its viewing angles are quite poor.

Performance:

The Nokia Asha 302's earpiece will treat you to a pleasant sound, with no overly-sharp frequencies. It might be difficult to tell who's actually calling, but at least it sounds fine. On the other end things are pretty average. As we said, we like how the loudspeaker sounds – it's powerful enough and doesn't sound too bad when set at the highest volume level.

The phone should last about a month if you aren't touching it, which is pretty neat. Otherwise, theoretical 2G talk-time reaches 9 hours, while 3G talk-time is 5.9 hours.

Conclusion:

The Nokia Asha 302 is your standard Series 40 affair. It doesn't have a touchscreen, but it compensates with a physical QWERTY keyboard, trying to appease those users needing such kind of input option. In terms of hardware, Nokia has done a remarkable job. There aren't many phones at this price point that can offer such build quality.

Unfortunately, this handset falls victim to its software, which is unintuitive and buggy. The Asha 302 costs as much as some low-end Android phones, which we would have been OK with, if it only meant that you won't be able to install many applications or do other such fancy stuff. But the Series 40 platform here is actually standing in the way of using the basic abilities of the phone, so why should you bother?

Software version of the reviewed unit: 14.26

Nokia Asha 302 Video Review: