Back in April 2010 Nokia announced a cheap ($125) feature phone with a QWERTY keyboard called the C3. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about it, save for the fact that it didn’t come with 3G connectivity, instead opting to come with WiFi. Over a year later, in October 2011, Nokia announced the Asha 200 and Asha 201. They’re the same device, except that the 200 takes two SIM cards, while the 201 only takes one. Anyway, those phones were basically the C3, but with a slightly curvier body, no WiFi connectivity, and an even lower ($80) price tag. Thanks to a shady online forum in China, we now have an image of an unannounced cheap Nokia QWERTY feature phone called the 302. The model name suggests that it’s a successor to the Asha 200/201, but it looks more like the C3, and even has hints of the higher end E6 in the design language. Specs include an updated camera (3.2 megapixels versus 2 megapixels on both the C3 and Asha 200/201), quadband GSM/EDGE (versus dual band on the Asha 200/201), and that’s it really.
Oddly enough, we heard about the 302 yesterday when Nokia’s Mobile World Congress lineup leaked. Said leak specified that the 302 is an Asha device and will be one of three feature phones being announced at the show, the other two being the Asha 202 and Asha 203. Now it’s hard to judge a feature phone without knowing anything about it. If Nokia manages to price the 302 at say $50, then we’ll stand up and applaud them for thinking about the emerging markets. And hey, maybe Series 40 will get some new interesting features that make it more attractive. At this point however, there’s nothing really to say except big surprise, another cheap dumb phone.
What we want to see are cheap smartphones, not feature phones, and there’s no technical reason why Nokia can’t put Symbian on sub $100 devices. Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, just wants to kill the platform since it’s competing with Windows Phone.
