QWERTY fans haven’t had much to get excited about lately. Few handset manufacturers are still building keyboard laden phones and the few that are around - like the BlackBerry Q10, tend to be quite pricey.
Thank goodness for Nokia then who are offering a low price alternative for those can’t stretch to a high or even mid range phone, or who just don’t want a BlackBerry.
The Nokia Asha 210 is about as low end as a handset can get while still being considered in any way a smartphone and is aimed primarily at emerging markets, but as a result it should be refreshingly cheap when it hits these shores.
Like many Nokia phones the Asha 210 comes in a variety of bright colours such as red, yellow and blue. It has a 2.4 inch 320 x 240 TFT screen with 167 pixels per inch. Then below that there’s a four-way navigation key, a camera button, a menu button, a call button, a power button and even a Facebook button, which gives you instant access to the social network and a ‘WhatsApp’ button, which makes it the first phone to build the popular free internet messaging service into its very hardware. Then taking up the bottom half of the handset there’s a full QWERTY keyboard.
There’s just a 2 megapixel camera on the back, a mere 32MB of RAM and only 64MB of built in storage, though it does have a micro SD card slot with support for cards of up to 32GB.
It also only has a rather small 1200 mAh battery, though being such a low end and low power handset that should more than suffice. But on the whole by now you can probably tell just how basic the Nokia Asha 210 is. There are a couple of nice features like the aforementioned Facebook and WhatsApp buttons, as well as ‘Slam’, which lets you share pictures, contacts or videos with other Bluetooth enabled handsets by just tapping the two together, all of which shows that the Nokia Asha 210 is aiming to be a very sociable phone, but that doesn’t hide the fact that this is a bare bones, entry level device.
In many ways though that’s a key selling point for it, After all there is a market for simple phones that can do the job of making calls and texts - complete with a QWERTY keyboard to make text entry easier and can manage a bit of web browsing over Wi-Fi but not much more. After all not everyone cares about apps, games, HD video and cameras, a lot of people would still rather just have a (slightly) smart phone.
For those people the Nokia Asha 210 could be perfect. As yet there’s no word on exactly when it will reach the UK - though it should be here within the next month or two. When it does arrive it’s expected to retail for around £50, making it somewhat cheaper than most other phones out there. If you’re still not sure about it you can see it in more detail here.
