Nokia Asha 300 review: King of ordinary

Good Nokia S40 browser

The Nokia Asha 300, unlike the Asha 303, features the previous browser version we already met on the X3-02 and the C3-01. Still, the Asha 300 offers a pleasant enough experience. Even the most elaborate pages are rendered well and finding your way around is reasonably comfortable on the touch-enabled display.

There is some familiar touch controls borrowed from Symbian S60 – the full screen switch and the zoom key. There is kinetic scrolling too, which works well enough.

The dedicated zoom key is the only zooming option – neither double tap nor the volume rocker works.

Despite the Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 support, Nokia Asha 300 web browser doesn’t support Flash. If you want to watch some YouTube stuff you’ll have to rely on the mobile version of the website. Anyway, the lack of Flash is not a big deal, especially for that small screen and the hardware specs.

Browsing GSMArena.com with the web browser

Organizer and apps

The organizer on the Nokia Asha 300 is well stocked as usual and things have been touch optimized.

The Calendar starts off with the month view – when you press and hold, a bigger number will pop up just above your finger so you can aim easier. When there’s an event on that date, the event description will pop up instead (it’s not visible otherwise, just like in the old S40 version).

Day view is also available, but strangely, week view has gone missing. You have various kinds of events available – reminder, meeting call, birthday, anniversary and memo.

Calendar month and day view modes • setting up an event

There are Notes and To-Do apps as well.

The alarm app uses big, touchable numbers, making it easy to set and you can make it go off only on specific days. You can customize the snooze time too, but there’s only one alarm available.

Setting up an alarm

The other organizing functions include a voice recorder with no time limit, a stopwatch and a countdown timer. They have been touch optimized as well, though we wish the countdown timer used the same big numbers as the Alarm clock.

The Nokia Asha 300 touchscreen calculator is brand new but has lost its advanced functionality (you only get the four basic math functions).

The Asha 300 comes with the traditional Converter app as well.

The World clock can tell the time in up to four cities. It offers a long list of supported cities, but there’s no search (so you have to scroll a lot for, say, Washington) and you can’t just tap on the map either.

The calculator • Voice recorder • Converter • World clock

Social networking

In the Nokia Asha 300 the Communities app is in charge of SNS. It handles Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and Flickr accounts, including several accounts of each type (though only one Facebook and one Twitter account can be connected at a time).

The Facebook section supports most of the communication capabilities of the service. You can view messages and events, friend requests and event invitations. Write on people’s wall and browse their profiles, post photos (either from the Gallery or you can snap a new one on the spot), post status updates, read news feeds and follow groups.

Browsing your Facebook profile through the Communities app

Twitter is an inherently simpler service but the app has plenty of features too. You can update your status, check your @mentions, send direct messages and reply to tweets too. We miss automatic upload of photos though.

Communities app does Twitter too

S40 doesn’t have multitasking even in this touch-enabled phase, but you can still receive updates even when you exit the Social app: put the Communities tab on the homescreen and pick a default account and you’re good to go.

Communities on the homescreen • picking a main account • Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are supported

The default account is what you see first when you start the app (so if you only have a Facebook account, you don’t have to tap the Facebook tab every time). Also, only updates from the main account will be visible on the homescreen. You can also set the time to receive new updates – say, from 8:00 to 22:00.