Nokia Asha 230

The Nokia Asha 230 is the most affordable Asha touch device till date. Just like other Asha devices, this model is set to come in Lumia style color variations like green, yellow, red, cyan, white, and black. The device has dimensions of 99.5x58.6x13.2mm and weighs in at 89.3g which is pretty light. This is the smallest Asha device till date. It is well-built, feels sturdy and has a pebble like form factor. It sports a 2.8 inch TFT LCD touch screen with a QVGA (320x240 pixels) resolution and a pixel density of 142PPI. The display has a 4:3 aspect ratio and supports 262k colors. As soon as you see the screen, it is pretty evident that it's a budget device due to washed out colours and fuzzy icons on the display. On the outside, the phone has a volume rocker, power/lock key and a back button on the front.

The Nokia Asha 230 features a 1.3 megapixel primary camera without flash. It supports a resolution up to 1280 x 960 pixels. It is a fixed focus camera with 3x digital zoom and has 3 camera modes; Photo, Video, Self-timer. The camera is good enough only for casual image sharing as it lacks quality. Images lack proper colour reproduction and the dull screen doesn't help either. The camera is capable of capturing videos at 15 frames per second but then again it isn't great quality either due to cost cutting for this budget device. Video playback formats supported are 3GP and MP4. The phone doesn't have a secondary, front-facing camera. The phone has a speaker at the back which gives decent undistorted sound output. The phone also has a 3.5mm stereo headphone connector. The device has a FM tuner so that you can listen to live radio streams. It comes with support for all the usual audio playback formats like WAV, MP3, MP4, MIDI and AMR.

As a major cost cutting move, Nokia has decided to give Wi-Fi and 3G a miss for the Asha 230. So basically it supports GPRS and EDGE as means to connect the device to the Internet. Evidently, the browsing capabilities will be limited by speed. The device supports Bluetooth 3.0 for file transfer. A dual SIM variant of this device is expected to come to select markets. The device has Nokia's Xpress browser which helps with enhanced UI and easy navigation. There is also the Nokia Nearby app for navigation purpose.

The phone has a 1020mAh battery which offers 11 hours of talk-time and an awesome standby time of 33 days. These are pretty good figures nowadays compared to other devices. The device is power efficient due to its small screen and limited connectivity options. The device has a inbuilt memory of 4GB and is expandable up to 32GB with a MicroSD card.