Nokia Asha 309 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia Asha 309 is yet another affordable feature phone with a touchscreen to arrive at our office, covering the ever diminishing gap between smartphones and feature phones. This time Nokia bid farewell to resistive and went with a capacitive 3-inch display, and with the fresh new swipe-based interface of the Series 40 platform, the company is playing what seems like its last cards to keep the feature phone alive.

In modern-day reality, though, the most affordable Android smartphones come at nearly the same price. Can the Asha really pull it against them? And is it a good phone on its own? That’s what we asked ourselves when we first saw it, and we’ll start looking for answers to those questions right away.

Design:

The Asha 309 is a compact little device that fits comfortably in the hand. It’s plastic all over, with a glossy removable back cover.



You can compare the Nokia Asha 309 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Designwise, it is fairly ordinary, described best by its slightly curvy shape and the two physical buttons on the front bulging out a bit.

The silver plating on the front edges should allude the look of more premium materials like aluminum, but it’s just a coat of paint. Conveniently placed on the right side are the volume rocker and lock key, clicky side buttons that are easy to press. Across, on the left, there is a microSD card slot.

While it’s not particularly exciting in terms of its design, this Asha feature phone is not too thick at 0.51-inch (13mm) thick, nor too heavy at 3.59oz (102 g), and it lays well in the hand.


Display:

The biggest advancement the Asha 309 introduces to the series is the capacitive touchscreen. The 3-inch capacitive LCD multi-touch display with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels makes navigating the phone easier than it was on previous Asha devices with resistive displays - everything requires less effort.

The resolution is fairly low, with pixel density of around 155ppi, and the screen reproduces only 65k colors.

Viewing angles are fairly tight, colors start fading out at even the slightest angle, and the same happens when you use the phone in direct sunlight. The device also lacks an ambient light sensor, and that means there is no automatic screen brightness adjustment.

Interface and Functionality:

Being a feature phone, the Nokia Asha 309 is based on the Series 40 platform, that recently got a refresh with swipe actions inspired by MeeGo, an Android-like notification shade and icon notifications similar to the ones in iOS.

It’s a welcome improvement that you’d appreciate from the get-go. Your missed messages and calls are visible straight from the lockscreen, and you can swipe them to go the application that issued them. You unlock the phone by swiping to either side.

Then, you arrive at a three-panel home screen. One of the panels is an app drawer, then there is a panel that you can customize with shortcuts and finally a dedicated panel for the dialer/music or radio.

All throughout the interface, you can swipe from top to bring the notification shade. There you can also find toggles for connectivity and quick access to your calls, messages and music.


And speaking of the interface in general, there are a lot of leftovers from the past, pop-up messages that annoyingly double check with the user when you try to exit an app, menus within menus within menus, and many more little annoyances, all across the system to remind you of its age.

Forget about apps on this feature phone. You do get a gift of free EA games when you buy this gadget, but don’t be fooled by titles like “Need for Speed” - those are merely extremely basic Java games and nothing more. The Nokia Store contains a few thousand applications, but again even basic apps like Facebook and Twitter are a disappointment of frustratingly slow performance.

Processor and Memory:

We don’t have the details on what kind of processor the Asha 309 uses, but we do know that it features 64MB of RAM memory, and a quick comparison with the older sibling in the Asha series, the Asha 311, hints the processor is far less capable.

What really matters is how the phone behaves and it was fairly speedy with basic tasks like opening the contacts log, but not completely lag-free. Also when switching between the three home panels there is a slight slowdown, but nothing fatal. Applications like the camera take a fairly long couple of seconds to open up.

The Asha 309 comes with 128MB of internal storage, but you can expand that with microSD cards of up to 32 gigs.

Internet and Connectivity:

Sporting a 3-inch capacitive screen and Wi-Fi connectivity, the Asha 309 has what it takes to connect to the Internet. With Nokia Browser 2.0, you can browse around simpler pages. You zoom in with a single tap on the screen, and double tapping zooms back out. We managed opening even moderately heavy websites, and that’s a plus. Cellular connectivity is limited to 2G GPRS/EDGE, though.


The Asha 309 lacks a GPS chip, but it does include Nokia’s Maps for Series 40 for your navigation and mapping needs. Having no GPS means it triangulates data from nearest cell towers to determine your position, and while not as accurate as GPS it does work when you need it.

Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP is also on board, allowing you to easily hook up wireless accessories like Bluetooth headsets.

Camera:

Skip to the back and you’d find one part that never changes in a phone - its camera. And with the Asha 309, you are stuck with a 2-megapixel fixed-focus camera with no flash that captures horrific photos. Colors are toned much warmer than they are in real life, with a yellowish tint and sore lack of details. They often turned out blurry, too.



Video on the other hand is recorded at QCIF, or 176 x 144 pixels at 13 frames per second, which is simply abysmal quality.

A strange little problem we ran into was that the on-screen video recording button simply did not work often times, and we had try and press it over and over again.

Multimedia:

Given its not so ample 128MB of internal storage, and the included 2GB (or 4GB in some markets) microSD card, you might want to get another card to store music. The device supports cards of up to 32 gigs and has a decent music player, with the loudspeaker getting fairly loud. For music playback, the device will last you up to 54 hours, which is great.


Playing back video on that tiny screen is more of a torture than anything else, but sometimes you might need to show something on video. You can do so, but the clips would have to be in a low resolution, close to the 240x400-pixel native one on the display. We could not get to play DivX/Xvid-encoded files.

Call quality:

The Asha 309 is a feature phone, which puts an even bigger focus on call quality. When listening to our callers on the earpiece we were pleasantly surprised by clean and natural sounding voices, but on the other end of the line it’s a slightly different story.

The microphone on the device obviously lacks in quality and our callers heard our voice muffled and a bit dull. Side noise however was nicely filtered out.

Battery:

A 1,110mAh battery would look like a joke inside a smartphone, but in the case of the Asha 309 it lasts a fairly long time. We could easily squeeze around two to three days out of it, more than smartphones, and that’s a plus. Talk time is 17 hours.

You can charge the phone via both microUSB and Nokia’s proprietary 2mm connector.

Conclusion:

Finally, the Nokia Asha 309 in today’s market will have a single argument to make to its buyers - price. Selling for around $105 - $110, it is almost as affordable as the bottom low of Android, the 2.8-inch Samsung Galaxy Pocket (sold for around $115).

And if you really want a similar, 3-inch display, the Android-running Samsung Galaxy Y (sold for $130) and the LG Optimus L3 (some $130), are only slightly costlier, but worlds apart in terms of the experience.

We do understand, though, why Nokia is releasing the Asha 309. Windows Phone cannot yet go as low as Android in smartphones, and the company is trying to hit price points just below the most affordable ‘Droids.

The sad reality however is that there is a world of a difference between smartphones and feature phones, and only a tiny price gap. With Java frustration instead of real apps, dead-ends instead of sharing options, Series 40 - even with its new interface and on a capacitive display - looks terribly dated.

Nokia Asha 309 Video Review: