Nokia’s not forgetting those who don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on the latest technology, making the low-end mobile phone market a low-end smartphone market. You can pretty much say goodbye to the “dumbphone”, with most of Nokia’s range switching to a web-connected handset this year.
This week at Nokia World, the once world-leading company announced several budget handsets in its “Asha” range, including two inexpensive devices with QWERTY keypads and one with a regular 12 main-button phone layout and touchscreen combo.
At the true budget end, Nokia’s Asha 201 sports a single colour design with a 10MB storage and a microSD slot for more memory, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.1, 2.4 inch screen, Symbian S40 operating system, and QWERTY keypad for easy typing of message.
The Asha 303 improves on the 201 by offering a 2.6 inch capacitive touchscreen to work with the QWERTY keypad, throwing in faster technology to work with the Symbian OS.
And for those of you still in love with the basic keypad, the Asha 300 has that along with a 2.4 inch version of the touchscreen found in the above 303 handset.
As technology journalists, we’d expect the Asha series to replace Nokia’s line of local budget handsets, although we have been told that Nokia is planning to release these in emerging mobile markets, meaning they could miss Australia altogether.
We do expect Nokia to release the hot Lumia handsets here, however, but as for when, that’s anyone’s guess. If Nokia chooses to put Australia under the same section as Europe for releases, we could see the handsets as early as November. Otherwise, expect the new devices to land next year.
