A striking phone to look at and hold in the hand, the Nokia Asha 303 easily matches the caliber of most high-end smartphones currently in the market. With 1GHZ CPU power, QWERTY keyboard and a 2.6 inch capacitive touchscreen, it was hard convincing myself that this handset could find its way to my pocket for just Ksh. 13,730. In addition, Nokia Asha 303 comes spruced up with superb Nokia hardware, Angry Birds- quite a sensational inbuilt game and 10Mbps/2Mbps download and upload capabilities respectively.
The average current market price of a Nokia Asha 303 is Ksh. 13,730 and can be bought at any Safaricom Shop, Airtel Shops, Ebrahim Electronics, FoneXpress and YU shops.
Nokia Asha 303 Pros:
- Handles most Java games and apps such as Nimbuzz, Mxit and 2go extremely well.
- Slim and stylish.
- Threaded SMS view.
- Supports upto 32GB of external memory.
- New S40 user interface which is easier to navigate through compared to Nokia C series.
- Superb built quality.
- Comes with Zenga TV app which streams popular Television networks over 3G.
- Users can enjoy internet browsing at no cost on free WIFI hotspots.
- Free unlimited firmware updates support from Nokia.
- Social hub widgets which can be configured on the homescreen (Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo).
Nokia Asha 303 Cons:
- Comes with a great 3Megapixel camera but without flash.
- I couldn’t find a way to play YouTube videos on regular 3G although the same videos played without a glitch using WIFI.
- Nokia Maps are conspicuously missing although Nokia claims availability of the same in the user manual.
- I found threaded SMS the best idea in the new Nokia S40 platform but occasionally, after long periods of intense chatting, threaded conversations seemed to go haywire mixing random parties in the same conversation. This problem can however be fixed by restarting the phone.
- Occasionally, the device suddenly restarts itself even when undertaking light tasks such as reading messages or viewing the gallery. On several instances the screen froze while viewing photos in the gallery and a few times while reading emails in the mailbox. I hope Nokia will address these issues in future firmware updates.
Nokia Asha 303 detailed features
| General |
2G Network |
GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 |
| 3G Network |
HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100 |
| Announced |
2011, October |
| Status |
Available. Released 2011, December |
| Body |
Dimensions |
116.5 x 55.7 x 13.9 mm, 72 cc |
| Weight |
99 g |
| Keyboard |
QWERTY |
| Display |
Type |
TFT capacitive touchscreen, 256K colors |
| Size |
320 x 240 pixels, 2.6 inches (~154 ppi pixel density) |
| Sound |
Alert types |
Vibration, Polyphonic(64), WAV, MP3 ringtones |
| Loudspeaker |
Yes |
| 3.5mm jack |
Yes |
| Memory |
Card slot |
microSD, up to 32GB |
| Phonebook |
Yes, Photocall |
| Call records |
Yes |
| Internal |
170 MB (100 MB user available), 256 MB ROM, 128 MB RAM |
| Data |
GPRS |
Class 33 |
| EDGE |
Class 32 |
| Speed |
HSDPA, 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2 Mbps |
| WLAN |
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n |
| Bluetooth |
Yes, v2.1 with A2DP, EDR |
| USB |
Yes, microUSB v2.0, USB On-the-go support |
| Camera |
Primary |
3.2 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, fixed focus |
| Features |
Face detection |
| Video |
Yes, VGA@15fps |
| Secondary |
No |
| Features |
CPU |
1 GHz |
| Messaging |
SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM |
| Browser |
WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, Adobe Flash Lite |
| Radio |
Stereo FM radio with RDS |
| Games |
Yes + downloadable |
| GPS |
No |
| Java |
Yes, MIDP 2.1 |
| Colors |
Red, Graphite, Silver White, Aqua, Green, Purple |
|
- SNS integration
- MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player
- MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC player
- Organizer
- Voice memo
- Predictive text input |
| Battery |
|
Standard battery, Li-Ion 1300 mAh (BP-3L) |
| Stand-by |
Up to 720 h (2G) / Up to 840 h (3G) |
| Talk time |
Up to 8 h 10 min (2G) / Up to 7 h 10 min (3G) |
| Music play |
Up to 47 h |
| Misc |
SAR US |
1.16 W/kg (head) 1.10 W/kg (body) |
| SAR EU |
0.79 W/kg (head) |
| Price |
Ksh. 13,730 |
Dennis Mayeku
Dennis Mayeku has contributed 82 awesome article(s) for The Openbook Blog.
Dennis Mayeku has a great fondness for open media and keeping tabs with the latest in mobile phone technologies and web-based applications.
