Nokia Asha 308 review: The tweener

Great file manager

The Nokia Asha 308 has something that makes the (supposedly dumb) S40 UI look much smarter than the likes of iOS and Windows Phone (even stock Android out of the box). That's right, we are talking about a full-featured file browser.

The app is called Files and lists all your local folders with the memory card on top. Different icons are available for the different file types, the multimedia files appear with small thumbs.

The powerful S40 file browser

A few handy options are available in the advanced menu - change view and sorting, add new folder or mark some/all files. If you tap and hold on a file you'll get options such as copy, cut, paste, rename, delete, mark and details.

The app has everything you may need in a file browser and puts to shame many smart file explorers thanks to its simple yet powerful interface.

Functional gallery and photo editor

The image gallery is a Symbian copycat. Photos are displayed in a three-column grid, with kinetic scrolling enabled. The gallery has one problem - it can't show more than 1000 images. So if your memory card is full of pictures, the Asha 308 is not the best choice of device to browse them on.

The Asha 308 gallery

You can organize your photos into albums and there is an album view as a separate tab in the gallery. The video section is the final tab and lists any supported videos you've uploaded on your memory card.

A tap and hold on a file lets you rename, delete, share or assign the image to a contact or set it as wallpaper.

Auto-rotation and pinch zooming are enabled in the gallery. The phone handles 2MP photos from its camera well enough, but there's still some lag when zooming.

Viewing a single image • Editing options

You can edit pictures from the advanced menu. The available options are crop, rotate, flip, effects, warp, add frame, clip art, add text, adjust brightness and contrast, retune colors or do auto enhance. Not bad, is it?

The renovated music player

The music player has a rather basic interface with lots of hidden features.

The Now Playing screen displays a large album art picture, alongside the track name, a scrubber and music controls.

The bottom of the screen has three tabs, the first one being the Now Playing screen. The next one is the Library with the default sorting options - all tracks, artists, albums, genres and videos. The last tab has your custom playlists with a few default ones available - recently added, recently played, most played and now playing.

The music player is nice

Shuffle, repeat and equalizers are available too. You can also play music over Bluetooth.

The music player options • Equalizers

The music player supports background playback, but there are no quick controls in the notification area or the lockscreen.

FM radio with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia Asha 308 comes with a neat and simple interface. You can change stations with the dedicated controls at the bottom. There is a tab with all available stations.

The FM radio app

The radio has RDS support and automatic rescanning.

Audio quality

Basic video player

There is no dedicated video player within this version of Series 40. You can find you videos in the dedicated video tab of either the gallery or the music player. Or browse them in the file manager.

The Asha 308 failed to play almost every video file we threw at it, except a QVGA MP4 clip (higher-res MP4s like nHD didn't work). Surprisingly, the phone managed to play the audio of some 1080p music videos, so we could at least listen to those.

The video interface is as basic as it gets

Mediocre audio quality

With no resistance applied to its line-out (when used with an active external amplifier), the Nokia Asha 308 does decently well, achieving some good (if some way off the best we have seen) scores and garnishing them with high volume levels. The frequency response is somewhat disappointing, though.

Plugging in a pair of headphones leads to a huge spike in intermodulation distortion and a moderate one in stereo crosstalk as well as some further deviation of the frequency response. Overall, the Asha 308 will hardly become the audiophile's favorite device.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:

Nokia Asha 308 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.