Yesterday, Nokia India invited us to its sprawling Mumbai office to give a heads up on its newest Asha series handset – the Asha 311. Launched a few days ago in India along with its cousin, the Asha 305, the 311 is targeted at the young and packs in loads of new features in that slim frame.
We will take a quick look at the phone. This is not a full review, mind you.
Below is a quick unboxing video of the Nokia Asha 311:
We expect a review unit to reach us in the next few days after which you can see a detailed article.
The Nokia Asha 311 is quite a decent looker. The unit that I received was finished in matt black color . The phone is quite slim and measures just 12.9 mm across. The small size makes it quite handy and it first perfectly in to even the smallest of pockets. The Asha 311 runs Nokia’s updated series 40 UI which is a complete departure from its earlier versions with the navigation method seeing a sea change here. Nokia has taken lots of inputs from its shelved Meego platfrom. Why? Because the way you are required to navigate the menu is reminiscent of the way you did it on the N9 – the only Meego powered device nokia launched.
Nokia has named this new UI “Asha Smart UI” and it requires the user to swipe across three different screens. You can move to any of these screens at any point of time and whilst running any application. There is also an Android influenced drop down notifications bar which gives you quick access to loads of menu settings.
Under the hood, powering the Nokia 311 is a processor that runs at 1Ghz. While the performance of the phone was great for the price at which it retails, there were occasional lags – which bothered me. But nothing to the extent that it would end up being a deal breaker. The phone gets a 3 -inch 400*240 pixels capacitive touchscreen display complete with Corning gorilla Glass covering for added durability.
Nokia had almost everything covered on the software front with the device coming preloaded with most of the popular Apps out there. The list of preloaded apps include Nokia Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook and twitter clients. Free versions of the popular Angry Birds titles are are also available. It also comes loaded with an EA Games pack which will allow users to download a bunch of games from EA – free of cost. This is of course apart from the collection of over 45 lakh songs which the user can download from the Nokia Music Store.
The Asha 311 currently retails for Rs. 6400 which is a great price for the kind of features it offers. Watch this space in the near future for a detailed review!
