The Nokia Asha 200 is a popular dual-SIM smartphone from the Finnish giant, mainly targeted at youngsters around the world. Navaneeth Ashok, a photography lover and a little techy fellow, bought one for himself and wanted to share his toughts with us.
He was looking for a trendy yet reasonably priced phone because his college life had just started. Among style and price, the other things he looked out for are battery life, build quality and multimedia capabilities (mainly music). From his experience, Navaneeth thinks that this phone is perfect bang for the buck. Read on to find out more.
Editorial: In this "People say" series of articles we ask ordinary people to give us a personal view on their smartphone. These opinions are based on their experience and may contain errors or omissions that should not detract from the overall content. Do not expect a large number of technical details in these posts, but an honest and down-to-earth point of view that contributes to understand the success (or failure) of a particular device.
The device I am going to review today is my new phone, the Nokia Asha 200. Launched in early 2012, and one of the best seller in feature phone category, this little device costs Rs 4080 (about 74 USD).
What is in the box?
The cover and the box of the Nokia 200 is very minimalistic in size and design. The box contains the phone neatly wrapped in plastic cover with the usual set of Nokia accessories: Battery, Charger, User guide and Headset. The new charger from Nokia looks compact and sturdy.
Phone – Hardware
Nokia Asha 200 is a dual-sim dual standby device, with a screen size of 2.4”. The device supports an external memory card of 32 GB. Other not so techy features include a FM radio with recording, 3.5mm AV connector as usual, Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0 and EDGE/GPRS support.
The physical dimension of the phone is 11.54 x 6.11 x 1.4 cm. The phone feels comfortable on hand and fits inside the shirt’s / jean’s pocket too comfortably.
Below the 2.4” display there are 6 keys and the d-pad. The outer ring of the Navi™ is used for navigation and has got silver lining throughout its edge. There are two keys in both sides with silver colour, used for OPTIONS and BACK . Overall this combination looks very sexy on the black Nokia Asha 200.
There are 4 buttons near the Scroll key (Navi™), the top left button is used as a Dual Sim Manager. [B]This is a pure waste of space as once used, and corresponding settings are saved no-one is required to press this button again[/B]. There is no option for changing it to call some other function. The top right key can be assigned functions like Mail, Chat, Social, Create message, Conversations, Inbox, Names and no-function.
The qwerty keypad of this phone looks little small when compared to that of Nokia X2-01. But this phone’s keypad is better designed, so after two days of usage you won’t type in a wrong key. The design of the keys looks as if it is smiling to us. The regular inputs are shown in white, whereas the numbers and special symbols are shown in orange colour. This combination feels nice on the eyes.
As you can see the microphone is placed near the z key, so the microphone is perfectly aligned with our mouth when we use the phone on the right ear, but there is no visible difference when used on the left ear too. The glossy front panel attracts fingerprints too much, this is very evident if we place the phone to sunlight.
The left side of the phone doesn’t have any button and the right side got sim slot and memory card slot. There is nothing in the bottom too.
The top side is occupied by usb connector, charger connector, the headset connector and a wrist strap holder too.
Now coming to battery, the device is powered by nokia BL-5J with 1430 mAh. Company claims a talktime of 7 hours and standy time of 890 hours with one sim only and with dual sim a standby time of 570 hours.
My opinion in this battery department is very good. The handset lasted for 4 days with almost 1.5-2 hours of calls per day, 50+ sms daily, playing music for 45 minute and web-surfing occasionally. So I think its pretty good for me.
Phone – Software
Nokia 200 is powered by Nokia Asha s40 OS, a customised version of S40 seen on asha series. As far as I am concerned the nokia brings one of the best user friendly interface, and same applies for asha 200’s interface too. Still the original S40 have little advantages too. Since it has familiar OS I am not going to dig deep into the subject.
Pros:
- If you have any “Missed Calls” or “Unread Messages” the keypad automatically blinks to grab your attention after every 40-50 seconds.
Cons:
- The device doesn’t support streaming, so you can’t play videos directly, eventhough there are apps which helps you to download youtube videos and all
- When we press END key during music playback, the music player automatically stops, to listen to music and do some tasks simultaneously you need to go to options, then select PLAY in BACKGROUND
And that’s it ! My review is complete. If you have any suggestion or doubt, please make your questions in the comments section below.
Written by Navaneeth at Navaneeth Little Blog