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Nokia Asha 210 Review: First Look

Going social – the Nokia Asha 210 is the Finnish company’s newest handset and focuses on keeping those social butterflies connected without costing an arm and a leg. Nokia’s Asha series has proven to be a driving force in markets across the globe for bringing more premium features to more affordable hardware and the 210 has its focus on social networking, or more specifically, WhatsApp.

We’d been told a while back to keep our eyes peeled for some sort of involvement with the multi-platform chat service, but this is the first tangible instance of a partnership. The Nokia Asha 210 is a fully fledged connected phone with both WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 and well as microSD support up to 32GB.

The design of the Asha 210 continues the trend started by the likes of the Asha 105 which basically closes the aesthetic gap between the Asha and Lumia series. On the likes of the 210, there’s a choice of five punchy matt colour options: yellow, cyan, magenta, black or white, with the main navigation keys and bezel always offering up a gloss black finish. The front features a pillowed QWERTY hardware keyboard, nav keys and two dedicated keys – one for fast access to the 2-megapixel camera, even from the lock screen and one for the aforementioned chat service WhatsApp.

Indeed the Asha 210 is the first phone to offer a dedicated WhatsApp key and Nokia have confirmed that through this new partnership, the handset will maintain a lifetime subscription to the chat service (which deals with more that 20 billion messages a day), included in the cost of the handset, great for those who plan to message on a budget. The 2-megapixel camera also offers up sharing options to all the popular social networks and even a special self portrait feature which will tell you when your face is perfectly framed using voice commands.

It’s also worth noting that there are variants of the 210 which feature a Facebook hardware key in place of a Whatsapp button, just as with the Asha 205 and can also be found to offer up Nokia’s easy swap dual-SIM capabilities too.

The Nokia Asha 210 is set to arrive before the end of Q2, 2013 and should cost around $72 (approximately £41).

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