My OperaThe case of the asha "smartphone"
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 6:42:17 AM
On this planet, there are three categories of mobile phones; Dumb phones, feature phones, and smart phones.
We all know the phones that are in the category of nokia's torchlight phones.... Ehen... Those are the dumb phones aka sim card holders. They are basic mobile phones: calls, sms and emergency illumination. The feature phones are the phones that we all know as the "java" phones run on proprietary firmware , with third-party software support of the Java ME platform.
The word "smartphone" at a time was what differentiated your regular cell phone from a phone capable of "pda" functions, the definition has moved on since then; the advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) on smartphones for running third-party applications allows those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than feature phones. Phones that were called smartphones less than a decade ago are now categorised as feature phones, the capabilities found in newer feature phones exceed those of older phones that had once been promoted as smartphones.
Some time ago, nokia announced the release of a new set of phones under the asha range of phones..... And they called them nokia asha smartphones... It piqued my curiosity.... And yours truly decided to see what made these new range different, unique, what set them apart from the good old series 40 "java" phones aka feature phones-now before I continue, you might want to know a bit more about nokia's series 40 and series 60 (symbian) operating systems.... Simply put, series 40 is a feature phone Operating system developed by nokia. It is the operating system installed on their "java" phones. Series 60 is an operating system for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP , C++ , Python and Adobe Flash.
I checked out the asha 311 as well as the 302... If you've used any of these phones,
or it is currently your phone, don't stop reading... I'm not dissing the phones, just read objectively...
I'll start out with the asha 302... It is a very sturdy, handsome looking phone with a nice set of shortcut keys, and the phone was very responsive, the homescreen reminded me of nokia's first attempt at a series 40 phone with a QWERTY keyboard-the C3-but with a befitting screen resolution. I say nothing new from that point on that I hadn't already seen in the C3, just better looking, and of course, a quicker response to input and file exploring with
.
Translation: it's a C3-00 upgrade folks, nothin much's eye popping here....
The asha 311 however, is a touchscreen device (capacitive, of course) with just call and end call buttons in front... And for the first time, series 40 was simplified to a certain extent, not to mention given a makeover.... The good news first: the user interface was redesigned with symbian belle look and icons-an app shortcut screen, the main app screen,as well as a third screen which is a dialer by default, but can be set as radio or music player, dragging the notifications panel downwards shows notifications (when present), switches for mobile data, wifi as well as sound profiles,
followed by shortcuts to create new messages, play music, or make a call... Its not a bad phone for everyday use, and the drag-down shortcuts are pretty useful if you loved nokia's express music series 40 phones.
The not so good news: if you've gotten your own customised .nth theme file for your nokia phone with your favourite swf clock wallpaper and your heartthrob's picture for a background that you've passed down from your 5300 to your 5130, it's journey just ended due to plane crash! *.nth themes are still there... But don't expect yours to work... AT ALL! Don't ask me why, I'd say laziness or the price of "progress". Only preset colour themes seem to work, ovi store's got nothin' that'll work with it themewise.. Things still didn't look so bad.... Then I tried sending java apps to it via bluetooth; this broke all my hearts; the app was labelled as an invalid application. Downloading a bible from bible4phone.com gave me the same result. Translation: only ovi store apps are supported.
Even with these limitations, if there were a wide range of apps available, it would have been a consolation prize, but what I found in the ovi store that was compatible and not net dependent were mostly games! A few potentially useful apps like editori text, sheet and pdf, have had negative reviews by most users, the paid pdf and document reader apps have been labelled as rip offs, or horrible apps by most users that cared to comment. The few good apps available are paid apps. Finding a non-crappy free app that doesn't require net access every single time is close to impossible.... Finding a non-crappy paid app is not impossible.... But the price might put you off, especially when you remember your older series 40 phones having similar apps for free.
The closest thing to multitasking available is rudimentary and is limited to switching to music player, making calls or writing an sms when running apps that are not in full screen mode.... Are they going to convince us that the number of API's for series 40 have faced any increment recently? From what I've seen, the answer is no.
To be honest, they wouldn't have been called smartphones even when symbian (rest it's digital soul) was king.... I don't know who came up with the idea that a 1 gigahertz processor and 256 MB of RAM make a smartphone, but, come on, please! When series 40 write promotion exam? The nature of the operating system imposes limits that smartphones were meant to transcend.
My advice is simple: if you want a touchscreen phone capable of whatsapp messaging, this is not a bad choice, but if you need a smartphone, this is definitely not the phone for you.
We all know the phones that are in the category of nokia's torchlight phones.... Ehen... Those are the dumb phones aka sim card holders. They are basic mobile phones: calls, sms and emergency illumination. The feature phones are the phones that we all know as the "java" phones run on proprietary firmware , with third-party software support of the Java ME platform.
The word "smartphone" at a time was what differentiated your regular cell phone from a phone capable of "pda" functions, the definition has moved on since then; the advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) on smartphones for running third-party applications allows those applications to have better integration with the phone's OS and hardware than feature phones. Phones that were called smartphones less than a decade ago are now categorised as feature phones, the capabilities found in newer feature phones exceed those of older phones that had once been promoted as smartphones.
Some time ago, nokia announced the release of a new set of phones under the asha range of phones..... And they called them nokia asha smartphones... It piqued my curiosity.... And yours truly decided to see what made these new range different, unique, what set them apart from the good old series 40 "java" phones aka feature phones-now before I continue, you might want to know a bit more about nokia's series 40 and series 60 (symbian) operating systems.... Simply put, series 40 is a feature phone Operating system developed by nokia. It is the operating system installed on their "java" phones. Series 60 is an operating system for smartphones that supports application development in Java MIDP , C++ , Python and Adobe Flash.
I checked out the asha 311 as well as the 302... If you've used any of these phones,
or it is currently your phone, don't stop reading... I'm not dissing the phones, just read objectively...
I'll start out with the asha 302... It is a very sturdy, handsome looking phone with a nice set of shortcut keys, and the phone was very responsive, the homescreen reminded me of nokia's first attempt at a series 40 phone with a QWERTY keyboard-the C3-but with a befitting screen resolution. I say nothing new from that point on that I hadn't already seen in the C3, just better looking, and of course, a quicker response to input and file exploring with
.
Translation: it's a C3-00 upgrade folks, nothin much's eye popping here....
The asha 311 however, is a touchscreen device (capacitive, of course) with just call and end call buttons in front... And for the first time, series 40 was simplified to a certain extent, not to mention given a makeover.... The good news first: the user interface was redesigned with symbian belle look and icons-an app shortcut screen, the main app screen,as well as a third screen which is a dialer by default, but can be set as radio or music player, dragging the notifications panel downwards shows notifications (when present), switches for mobile data, wifi as well as sound profiles,
followed by shortcuts to create new messages, play music, or make a call... Its not a bad phone for everyday use, and the drag-down shortcuts are pretty useful if you loved nokia's express music series 40 phones.
The not so good news: if you've gotten your own customised .nth theme file for your nokia phone with your favourite swf clock wallpaper and your heartthrob's picture for a background that you've passed down from your 5300 to your 5130, it's journey just ended due to plane crash! *.nth themes are still there... But don't expect yours to work... AT ALL! Don't ask me why, I'd say laziness or the price of "progress". Only preset colour themes seem to work, ovi store's got nothin' that'll work with it themewise.. Things still didn't look so bad.... Then I tried sending java apps to it via bluetooth; this broke all my hearts; the app was labelled as an invalid application. Downloading a bible from bible4phone.com gave me the same result. Translation: only ovi store apps are supported.
Even with these limitations, if there were a wide range of apps available, it would have been a consolation prize, but what I found in the ovi store that was compatible and not net dependent were mostly games! A few potentially useful apps like editori text, sheet and pdf, have had negative reviews by most users, the paid pdf and document reader apps have been labelled as rip offs, or horrible apps by most users that cared to comment. The few good apps available are paid apps. Finding a non-crappy free app that doesn't require net access every single time is close to impossible.... Finding a non-crappy paid app is not impossible.... But the price might put you off, especially when you remember your older series 40 phones having similar apps for free.
The closest thing to multitasking available is rudimentary and is limited to switching to music player, making calls or writing an sms when running apps that are not in full screen mode.... Are they going to convince us that the number of API's for series 40 have faced any increment recently? From what I've seen, the answer is no.
To be honest, they wouldn't have been called smartphones even when symbian (rest it's digital soul) was king.... I don't know who came up with the idea that a 1 gigahertz processor and 256 MB of RAM make a smartphone, but, come on, please! When series 40 write promotion exam? The nature of the operating system imposes limits that smartphones were meant to transcend.
My advice is simple: if you want a touchscreen phone capable of whatsapp messaging, this is not a bad choice, but if you need a smartphone, this is definitely not the phone for you.
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