Nokia Asha 300: hands-on and first impressions

The Nokia Asha 300 is easily the most straightforward-looking of the our Symbian phones announced at Nokia World today.

Taking its design cues straight from last year’s Nokia C3 Touch and Type, the Asha 300 is a slim candybar phone with an old-school 12-key numeric pad and a new-school touchscreen.

This best of both worlds approach means that fans of ye olde predictive text can give their thumbs the kind of workout they’re used to while the touchscreen gives you a more modern mobile web browsing feel and yes, it also means you can play Angry Birds, a Lite version of which comes pre-installed.

That’s not all the Asha 300 has to offer; it comes with a 5-megapixel camera tucked away inside its slender shell, a microSD card slot that can handle cards of up to 32GB and a meaty 1GHz processor, something you’d normally see inside a much pricier smartphone.

Nokia says that its proprietary browser offers “affordable and localized Internet access by compressing web pages by up to 90%,” Opera Mini style.

At €85 which converts to roughly £75 at the time of writing, the Nokia Asha 300 is really attractively priced. It could well go on to repeat the trick of the good old Nokia 6300 which sold by the bucketload, but then again, we’ve been expecting that of other Nokia phones from the past few years. We do think that the Asha 300 represents great value for money though – word on UK pricing and availability as and when we hear it.

Until then, feel free to have a browse through out hands-on pics snapped at Nokia World 2011.