The Asha 308 has been retailing in Kenya for a while since it was officially unleashed a few months back, so it’s not a new comer but only a few potential buyers have the right facts about it. Like some of the Asha siblings, it’s a dual sim device with a 3.0inch capacitive display instead of a Qwerty key-pad. For those who’ve had or are familiar with the asha lineup, Nokia has been keen to separate dual sim and Qwerty keypad features on these devices, so it’s not unexpected to see the same scenario repeated on Asha 308. There’s not much underneath just like the rest of asha siblings, so don’t expect the same experience as you’d on pricier devices; instead, if you’re looking for an exceptional device, be ready to pay more for a windows, iOS, Blackberry or an android handset. The phone doesn’t have a lot to offer, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely worthless, for a retail price of around Ksh.10500 in Kenya, I’d say asha 308 deserves unbiased consideration.
The Asha-series are undoubtedly popular, just like the Galaxy line-up from Samsung, L-series from LG and xperia from Sony, but what we don’t know is exactly how well these devices are doing on the market. Recently, we got an insight on L-series performance, they aren’t doing as bad as we’d expected, but that’s different considering all L-series are powered by Google’s fastest growing mobile OS, Android. There’s stiff competition on the market but that’s not the deciding factor here, there’s price and features too to consider. LG Electronics released some of its best wished for news regarding the impressive sales of its Optimus L-Series smart phones. LG managed to exceed 10 million units in sales of the L series as of December 2012. Asha 308 doesn’t have a built-in wifi adaptor, that’s really disappointing given its now unofficially standard for devices within the same price range to have wifi, I can easily get cheaper phones such as Huawei Y-100 (Kshs.9000), Techno N3 (Kshs.8000) and Samsung Galaxy Pocket(Kshs.9000) running on android that have WLAN capability and a decent internal storage memory.
- Display : 3.0inch 240×400 (155ppi) TFT Capacitive touch screen, 65k colors
- Camera: Pri: 2.0MP (1600x1200pixels), Fixed focus, 4x zoom
- Storage: Up to 32GB MicroSD, 64mb Internal memory,
- Connectivity: MicroUSB v2.0, Bluetooth v3.0,
- Internet: GPRS 12 – 85.6 KBit/s, EGPRS 12 – 236.8 kbit/s KBit/s
- Other ft: Dual SIM, Nokia Maps (available as a free download), FM radio
- Battery: Standard Lithium ion 1110 mAh