Video and Gallery: Nokia Asha 311 pics and hands on demo
So after the launch we had a brief demo time with the Nokia Asha 311, the higher end of the first set of Full Touch S40 handsets.
In a little later, I’ll be uploading the 305/306 demo which shows just how much difference the capacitive screen makes. Also I think the 305 is just darn ugly whilst the 311 is quite classy looking (well, in black or white).
See in action the swipy home screens, notification bar etc. I’ve got a couple or so more videos looking a little closer at some of the features.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig4wGQ_dIlw&feature=youtu.be
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Wow, that looks pretty fluent.
Well done Nokia…
Hey jey, thanks i eagerly waiting for video review…..shall i wait for meltmi handsets or buy this 311 or android ????????
there is no meltemi
says who?
Hello Jay!
Is that Meltemi in Asha Touch devices? Do you know something that we don’t?
it’s just a S40 phone and runs java apps only
In my opinion, you may well get 311 which I feel will get updated with Meltemi(along with the other 3XX family like 302\303 with 1GHz processor) when it comes in the end of this year. This is just my assumption since I don’t feel there is any other reason to have a 1GHz processor on these phone when rest of the series don’t have that..
Ashe full touch looks damn solid. No need for resistive touch handset unless you always wear work gloves. I can see this new S40 taking Belle’s place in year or 2, but without Symbian’s restrictions.
Totally agree, if this asha series sells well, Nokia will surely upgrade the hardware, maybe a 1.3GHZ with 5mb camera in next year.
this looks great im really quite impressed with the Asha line and especially these latest devices
It looks like N9 with 3 column plus Belle Facelift
The N9 in colors with a whole lot more apps and a whole lot cheaper.
Nice.
It is a nice phone, really like it. Don’t get me wrong, but you see… I am just possesed and obsessed with the Nokia N9… And as this is a some kind of an addiction, I suppose it will not change soon…… Sorrry.
I just had to Laugh when he said that the phone was thin..HA! Are they on drugs? Nokia never makes thin devices.. too bad actually..
Me too, thin… Really?? Haha!
Hey Jey,This nokia asha 311 has meltmi update????????? From resources meltmi is linux based tile UI based handsets with QT………..
Damnnnn that’s smooth.
311 looking like a winner device for its price range. The Nokia dev team for asha did a great job with the ui! I’m really impressed!
For the 305 and 306, I hope the resistive screens do not hamper the user experience as much, it would be really frustrating to type long text messages if the screen is too unresponsive. Looking forward to see the next demo videos for the remaining asha touch phones. Why do I have a feeling that the 311 could be possibly updated with meltemi??
I hope you guys also add a sound effect to the My Nokia Blog intro, that would be a nice addition.
OK We’ll look for some royalty free sound. Ali already picked his track for his vids. At the moment, all the videos i’ve recorded and processed in advance have no sound – so there’ll be a few more videos until one with audio in the intro appears.
No worries. Being able to watch the videos is more important than the sound effect. Finally able to watch a demo of these phones in english. Thanks!!!
APPS, APPS, APPS!!!!!!!!! u can say what you want about the UI, design or whatever but the lack of APPS will make then a failure (the ultra low-end androids are eating the S40 sales because of apps, and not the eye-candy and the multitasking)
that will always be a problem.s40 cant simply compete with android especially in apps,java and symbian apps sucks infront of android apps.
Without the gps hardware, will you have to pay or will you be charged when using Nokia Maps? I have no idea if the cell id positioning is free or what. Can someone enlighten me with this??
Cell ID positioning is free to use but requires a small http request through web to get the coordinates from the servers which contain the coordinates of the different cell towers.
Also, for now, Nokia doesn’t have an option to download\store offline maps on S40. So they do download maps when you switch it on.
Cell positioning works by having a database of cell towers and their latitudes and longitudes, and then by triangulating the signal strength you can approximate your position – quite the same way we used to do it for decades prior to GPS. If you can keep the database on the device you don’t have to pay a dime, but since that’s ever-changing data you need to ask a server for an updated list. It still eats a silly amount of bandwidth and can be possibly done all ‘offline’ (as in, not requesting data from any server) if you update the list manually. Not sure the Asha line would support that.
What it essentially does is what the ‘A’ part in A-GPS does – it tries to estimate your location as much as possible, and if you have a GPS you can then easily chose which satellites to listen, severely reducing the GPS lock-in time. For that reason servers such as supl.nokia.com and supl.google.com are used – they essentially provide you with a latitude and longitude of a cell tower for the provided network and tower ID.
The data exchange in that case is very small, now if you are to pull the maps from the network as well, then you can talk about having huge charges added on top of using the Nokia Maps on Asha line. AFAIK, you can pre-load maps on the Asha line as well to be used in ‘offline’ mode.
Cool thanks Ebon & Unicorn N9s and incognito! That really cleared it up.
In comments of http://conversations.nokia.com/2012/06/06/have-a-touch-nokias-new-asha-phones/ rossanaatnokia writes:
“But, please notice that for first time the Nokia Asha 311 includes full cell ID
information which allows for immediate offline positioning – no data connection
required.”
That database has to be updated from time to time, tho. There are a couple of cell towers built and decommissioned each day so that database can soon end up as obsolete. I guess it periodically updates its data in which case it either has to eat some bandwidth from time to time, or it gets updated during synchronization with Nokia Suite.
I don’t think the resistive screen is the culprit for the slower 305\306 since as incognito said in a previous article, Nokia did manage to utilize the resistive screen very well in the N900. The specs for the 305\306 doesn’t include the 1GHz clock speed and I assume this plays the bigger part on the performance.
Here is the link from the developer site to compare specs between 305, 306 & 311: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/Comparison.xhtml?dev=Asha_305,Asha_306,Asha_311
nice.
Nokia 311 can multitasking? Please reply.,
Only with couple of internal apps. Kind of like WP.
Yeah.,thankz a lot.,i hope the apps can better than symbian,.nice ui.,
Great Demo, awesome job guys!
This phone looks spectacular for its price range!
It really does look allot like Harmaten light which would be absolutely awesome if Nokia had decided that it had enough muscle on its own to build an ecosystem across the whole range of products. Consistent UI/iconography and consistent App experience with Qt/QML. But alas, S40 and Belle share a family resemblance but Lumia looks alien. How are they planning to convince the next billion who buy Asha products in countries that can’t afford an Xbox or a Windows 8 PC to upgrade to Lumia for their next phone when it is a completely unrelated user experience to what drew them to Nokia vs cheap Chinese Android phones in the first place? I guess I’m still not seeing the whole strategy here
“One size never fits all”
Thats the strategy.
Elop himself indirectly implied that in his every interviews.
Can you make a demo of the text input method???… right now this my only question, its good or bad???
Nice phone, nice UI a mix between Symbian Belle and N9 UI. A primary phone for those that can’t afford the smart ones.
I would really have loved to have this to be my backup phone only if it had all of those features plus Dual SIM.
very informative /////////////////
Does anyone know if the 311 has a microSD slot and how large capasity cards it supports?
Yes it will support upto 3g gb of sd card
Thanks for the info! I assume you meant 32gb with “upto 3g gb of sd card”?