Nokia Asha 310 Review

Introduction

Nokia's Asha range proved plenty popular since its introduction, hitting the sweet price spot between lowly feature phones and smart handsets, and managed to keep the company afloat during the Lumia phones transition.

Now that Lumias cover the gamut of price points, the Asha range has to be reinvented a bit to stay in the game, and the affordable Asha 310 is the first in the line with both dual SIM slots and Wi-Fi connectivity. Is this enough to make it battle low-end Lumias and cheap Androids? Read on to find out...

In the box:

• Wall charger
• In-ear stereo headphones
• Warranty and information leaflets

Design

Asha 310 is a soapy-shaped, comfortable to hold little handset, in champagne, white or gray metallic shell, which is patterned on the back. It's no doubt chubby for today's standards, but since it is pretty small, that extra thickness makes it lie well in the palm, and not be completely lost in there.



There's a lot of polish and shine all over the chassis, including the call/hang physical keys underneath the display, which are in glossy piano black, and elevated to form a wave together with the microphone in-between.

The call key feels a bit iffy, with hollow feedback, and the side buttons, like the volume rocker and lock key on the right could use more click, but other than that they are all easy to feel and press without looking at the phone.

Nokia has done the right thing, and took one of the two regular SIM card slots on the left side of the phone. The feature is called Easy Swap for a reason, since you can hot-swap different carrier networks on the fly when the situation calls for it, while your default SIM is tucked neatly underneath the battery The microSD slot is also on the side, easing the access to additional memory, so in terms of access flexibility, the Asha 310 can put many to shame.


Display

The 3” capacitive touchscreen panel sports lowly 240x400 pixels of resolution, rocking it old school. Other than the grainy image on account of the low 155ppi count, the panel sports decent colors and viewing angles, but could use more brightness outside.

In addition, its contrast ratio leaves something to be desired, so sunlight visibility is not the Asha 310's strong point. There are oleophobic and scratch-proof coatings, though, so it's a decent panel for the phone's rock bottom price point.



Interface and functionality

Nokia insists on calling the Asha range (using Nokia's Series 40 interface) “smartphones”, on account of the many thousands of Java applications available for them in the Nokia Store, but to hedge its bets, it also throws in 40 Electronic Arts game titles for free with the Asha 310.

The newest touch edition of Series 40 has an interface with all the prerequisites indeed, such as a lockscreen with time/date/connectivity status info, homescreen for app shortcuts, pull-down notification bar with connectivity switches, and the venerable back button and context menu keys in an on-screen version. The rounded app icons are really huge, making them easy to press on the smallish display. The on-screen keyboard, on the other hand, is really tiny on the 3” display in portrait mode, so we'd recommend using its keypad, rather than QWERTY layout.


Swiping left and right changes between the homescreen, the app drawer and the dialer, while the notification bar has a small “lip” at the end for easier pulling, and gives quick access to the call, messaging and music playback apps, along with toggles for data, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, as well as the sound profiles. There is a cool volume animation with a speaker popping up when you press the rocker, which can be tapped to switch off the sound completely.

The Asha 310 comes preloaded with Facebook, Twitter and the eBuddy push chat app for the social media junkies, and it also offers all the basic utility apps, as well as a SIM card manager for the two SIM slots. The app lets you set the default network for calls, data and messaging, or choose the option to be asked each time which card to use for the action. You can also set up to five different SIM profiles for work, home, data-only cards, and so on, and the cards can be inserted in and out without turning off the handset first for the ultimate convenience.



Processor and memory

Unsurprisingly for a Series 40 phone, the Asha 310 doesn't require powerful hardware, and makes do with 1 GHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, and 128 MB of ROM for the OS and default apps. Still, the interface is zippy enough, and app loading times reasonable. The phone offers a microSD slot on the side for extra memory, and comes with either 2 GB or 4 GB piece in the box, depending on the region, but supports cards up to 32 GB of size.

Internet and connectivity

The phone does sport Wi-Fi connectivity, which is a first for a dual SIM Asha, but for those times when you are using data through one of your SIMs, Nokia provides its Xpress Browser. It precaches the pages on Nokia's servers before serving them to you, thus saving you on traffic charges.

As you can guess, on the 3” screen with 155ppi, text is pixelated and images grainy, and the browser is no speed rendering demon either, taking a few choppy moments while scrolling and panning around, or pinching to zoom. It's thus good for quick checks and basic tasks, rather than long browsing sessions.


The Asha 310 sports EDGE network download speeds up to 237 kbps (no 3G), as well as Wi-Fi b/g, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS and FM radio and microUSB 2.0 port for wired connectivity and that's about it. The excellent Nokia Maps service comes preloaded, but it seems only the map of your region can be preloaded for offline usage.

Camera

There is a basic 2 MP camera on the back with fixed focus and no flash, so the photographic results are pretty poor. Nokia has spiced it up on the interface side, letting you apply a number of color effects to the pictures, and also switch on the “fun sounds” option which can turn your boring shutter sound into a crazy karate battle cry, among other things.


The photos come out rather overexposed and washed out, with unnaturally high color saturation, and even blurry spots. Video is shot with 176x144 definition, so it's not even worth watching on the phone's screen, let alone for any other purpose.



Multimedia

The gallery has a simple grid layout for photo thumbnails, but it has a surprisingly powerful editor built-in, which lets you crop, rotate, enhance, remove red eye, annotate, add effects and so on.


The music player sports categorization options by artists, albums, playlists, and even genres, as well as a few equalizer presets. The loudspeaker is not crystal clear, but with a pretty strong output.


Standard MPEG-4 videos can be played up to 480x800 definition, though the 3” low-res display is not exactly welcoming for video playback.

Call quality

Voices sound quite muffled in the earpiece of the Asha 310, and when you crank it at highest volume, they tend to get distorted. On the other end things are a bit better, as the microphone of Nokia's handset managed to relay our voice fairly loud and clear to our conversation buddy, though with a slight distortion, too.

Battery

The 1100 mAh unit in the Asha 310 lasts quite a while, as the basic OS and the 2G connectivity keep power requirements at bay. Nokia cites 17 hours of talk time and more than three weeks of standby, which is very good, though if you constantly maintain two carrier connections, the standby times will get lower.

Conclusion

Overall for the $100 off-contract price you get what you pay for with the Asha 310 in terms of screen resolution and other hardware extras, but the phone does have a few aces up its design sleeve, such as good build quality and ergonomic grip. The phone does sport a subpar camera as well as lousy voice quality in the earpiece, but some major tradeoffs could be expected for the rock-bottom price.

The Easy Swap Dual SIM system is a godsend for those who look for an inexpensive handset to juggle their personal and work numbers from a single phone, mixing it up with other cards quickly without having to switch off the handset first.

As a phone with both dual SIM slots and Wi-Fi connectivity, it is somewhat unique to compete in the Asha range, but then there's Android, which has the Samsung Galaxy Y Duos, for example, which gives you all the wonders of the Google Play Store for just a little bit more. If you want a bit larger screen with better resolution, as well as better camera, you can pony up a few tens more for something like the Sony Xperia tipo dual as well.

Software version: V 07.37

Nokia Asha 310 Video Review: