Not a smartphone but doesn't feel cheap

Dubai: Nokia's new Asha 303 handset offers the convenience of touch and type phones — most importantly — a full qwerty keyboard.

The Asha 303 is not a smartphone of course and the biggest omission is multitasking. It has almost all the features of a smartphone. It is built with the ease of the internet and social networks in mind.

More compact

The Asha is a bit more compact and weighs 99 grams. It is a simple yet stylish handset. Budget or not, the phone doesn't feel or look cheap. There's a touch of metal on the rear, which doesn't add too much weight.

The 2.6-inch pixels capacitive touchscreen has QVGA resolution and can display up to 256,000 colours. It is powered by 1GHz ARM11 processor and provide low power single channel RAM with 128MB and 256MB ROM and runs on S40 operating system.

Internal storage is rather low at just 100MB, but you can beef it up using a microSD card. Up to 32GB is supported. It also supports 3G network.

There are four keys under the display: two call keys and two shortcut buttons — messaging and music.

The left-hand side of the handset has nothing but the lanyard eyelet. The right side features the lock key and the volume rocker. The top of the phone features the microUSB port, the 3.5mm audio jack and the charger plug.

The back panel of the handset features the 3 megapixel camera lens at the top and the loudspeaker grill at the bottom. There‘s no LED flash and the camera lens has no protection against scratches.

You need to take the battery out to get access to the SIM and microSD slots.

The social app supports social networking integration (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr) while the chat app supports Facebook, Google Talk, Ovi Chat, Windows Live Messenger, Myspaceim and Yahoo! chat. The photos app offers only a single viewing mode, displaying a grid of 12 pictures on the screen. You can switch to landscape mode from the menu though — it makes better use of the screen real estate when you open a photo.

There is no dedicated camera key and it produces photos with maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536.

Going into the options menu, you get a pop up that looks like the one on Symbian. There are controls here for effects (greyscale, sepia, negative), white balance, a viewfinder grid and extended settings. Despite its decent brightness, the image quality is nothing to get excited about. The sunlight legibility is decent, but not perfect.

There's a simple image editor too, which can crop/rotate images, add text, clipart and effects, plus adjust brightness/contrast and colour. The other features on the handset are the music player, FM radio and a new cloud-based Nokia Browser. One cool feature is that you can now also select where games and apps should be installed and where audio and video should go. There are plenty of apps and games, a lot of them free. Having an app store for a feature phone is more than I expected.

The Li-Ion 1300 mAh battery provided up to 6 hours of talk time (moderate usage) and 4.5 hours battery life when using the 3G function, different features and apps. It is priced at Dh528.