While it may be trying hard (so far, unsuccessfully) to regain lost ground in the high end segment with its Lumia range of Windows Phone powered handsets, there is no denying the fact that Nokia has been doing pretty well when it comes to the low- end feature phones segment.
Its Asha range of affordable featurephones has been well received and Nokia seems to be in no mood to stop flooding the market with even more Asha branded devices. The latest handsets to bear the ‘Asha” tag are the just announced Asha 205 and the Asha 206 – announced just yesterday. Let’s see what these two handsets have in store for you.
Asha 206
When I first took a look at the Asha 206 (in pictures), it looked nothing like an “usual” Nokia handset. The design cues seem to have been inspired from Sony Ericsson’s featurephones of the yesteryears. No complaints on that front. The Asha 206 comes in two variants – a single SIM and a dual SIM version, so make sure you get the “right” one when you go out to buy one.
The Asha 206 gets a 2.4 inch, 240*320 pixel QVGA TFT display. It gets a 1.3 megapixel camera at the rear and can capture videos as well. There is no support for 3G and you’d have to be content with EDGE speeds. But then, with the Nokia Express Browser preinstalled which compresses web pages, we hope Internet browsing on this phone is not a laborious process given the kind of EDGE speeds we are used to seeing in India.
The phone gets 10 MB of internal memory which is grossly inadequate. But then, this is why we have micro SD cards for, right? If you are rich enough, you can get a 32 GB microSD card to store all your stuff. The phone supports Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and also something known as “Slam” which uses Bluetooth for file transfers without the need for pairing it with another device.
The phone is quite compact and tips the scales at 91 grams. The single SIM variant of the phone offers 20 hours of talktime and 47 days of standby time. Apps are available in plenty and let me also remind you that if you intend to use WhatsApp on this phone, get the single SIM version as the application won’t work on the dual SIM variant.
The Asha 206 is expected to be made available in the next few weeks for $62.
Asha 205
Moving on to the Asha 205, this one is claimed by Nokia to be their most “social” Asha phone to date. The phone features a QWERTY keypad which should be a boon for messaging freaks. The phone also gets a dedicated Facebook button – a thing which has not been seen on Nokia phones until now.
The Asha 205 features a 2.4 inch landscape QVGA display and comes with a very basic VGA camera at the rear. At just 94 odd grams, the device is quite lightweight as well. The internal memory is restricted to just 10 MB. Again, microSD cards will be needed for your aid here with the phone officially supporting memory cards of up to 32 GB in capacity.
Like the Asha 206, this one too comes in single and dual SIM variants.The device also comes with the Nokia Express Browser – a much needed feature owing to the fact that there is no support for 3G. While there is no Maps application installed on this device, it comes with something known as Nokia Nearby which uses Nokia Maps technology to point out places of interest, restaurants and landmarks using cell triangulation.
The Nokia 205 too would see a launch in the next few weeks at a price tag of $62
In the meantime, you might want to take a look at our Asha 311 review.
