Nokia Asha 302 - Conclusion

I have to start by saying that I failed in my experiment to use the Asha 302 solely for a week, I just could not manage to do it. I'll talk more about the reasons why towards the end of this article but for now i'll talk more about the phone.

When used for calls the Asha 302 is superb, on this front it's probably one of the best I've used in years. The voice quality is crystal clear with plenty of volume, this makes calls very pleasant. The volume of the ringer and strength of vibration also make it a great device for calling. Text messaging is good too, the qwerty keyboard is of high quality and the initial stiffness soon wears off making it easier to use. I did find it a bit small and very difficult to use one handed due to the shape of the phone, nearly dropping it several times. The speed of the messaging app is good and it worked very well although the conversation view was a little cramped due to the screen size.

One feature I really disliked was the email client, it took a lot of attempts to get my Gmail working on it as it kept on failing to connect for no reason. The app is basic and emails are shown in plain text which I find very annoying and there didn't appear to be an option to show them in the original format. It was also quite hit and miss whether it notified me of messages or not which mean't I had to keep on accessing the app to check for new messages. The web browser was ok, not overly good or bad it just worked and at a reasonable speed.

Built into the Asha 302 is Nokia's social app for services like twitter and facebook, both services worked ok but I found the twitter app to be very restrictive as it only loaded around ten tweets at a time. For a heavy twitter user like myself it wasn't a pleasant experience and found myself trying web based alternatives instead. Twitter mobile and dabr both work ok through the Asha's browser but neither gave me the twitter experience I wanted plus were a chore to access quickly being within the browser.

The user interface on the Asha is fairly easy and attractive to use but there's a lot of items buried in sub-menus and some that aren't obvious as to what they do. There's also a lot of confirmations to your actions which lead to lots of extra button presses, this makes it feel slower than it is which is a shame because it is quite a fast device. I often found myself getting frustrated when navigating the phone but I put that down to my love of touch screen devices. In the past series 40 phones like the Asha were regarded as the simpler, more basic alternative to Nokia's smartphones, to me it felt far more complex than a modern smartphone and a real throw back to the past.

After using the Asha 302 for three days I admitted defeat and put my sim back in my Lumia 800, I was happy again. I don't know if I've been spoilt by the Lumia's speed, blown away by it's twitter experience or have become addicted to windows phone but either way it was good to be using it again. I would say the Asha 302 is a good phone for someone who makes a lot of calls but isn't that interested in social media or a heavy email user. It's built well, looks good and the battery lasts for ages in it which few modern devices can claim nowadays.