Geekisms!

Even though things haven't been so rosy of late for the once reigning king of the mobile phone market, Nokia isn't letting the current situation weigh it down. The Finnish company is still fighting aggressively to conquer all aspects of the mobile market. The Lumia series to satisfy the Smartphone market and its Asha series for the not-so-smartphone and feature phone market and this year it has launched products across all these different segments of the market.

The latest of these products is the Asha 501 which heralds the next generation of Nokia's Asha smartphone platform. Most would have dismissed the Nokia Asha series as smartphones in the past but with last year's acquisition of Smarterphone, Nokia have brought in the technical know-how to take its Asha series to the next level and it shows on this phone.

The 501 features a 3-inch touchscreen, 3.2 Megapixel camera, Wifi, Dual-SIM support and an estimated talk time of 17 hours. On the downside it's a 2G phone and the screen has a paltry QVGA resolution but then this phone isn't targeted at people who will be bothered by these specs. Plus it comes in 6 different colours. Everyone loves colours!

The software end of things however is really interesting. This phone seems to have inherited part of the Nokia N9's DNA. You can double-tap on the screen to wake up the phone and display the lockscreen with notifications & time, and swipe to the side to unlock, just like on the N9. There's a lot more swiping to do once you've unlocked the phone, with 2 homescreens that can be accessed by swiping left or right and while one features the regular homescreen with an app list, the other (titled Fastlane) shows a list of recently used apps that can quickly be relaunched. You can also swipe to close apps. All this seems a deeply reminiscent of the multitasking feature on the N9. It also features a drop down area for toggling connectivity settings.

The new Asha platform also features Nokia's Xpress browser with data compression and popular apps like Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Bejeweled 3, Plants vs. Zombies and Twitter. Clearly developers see the Asha platform as a profitable platform to work on.

The way I see it, while Nokia strives for relevance in the developed world with its Lumia series, it has aimed its Asha platform at densely populated developing countries in Asia and Africa where its affordable prices and smartphone like features will pit it against competitors like Samsung, LG, Tecno, and other producers of low end android smartphones. The advantage they have in these places is that many still remember the power house that Nokia was a few years ago and are willing to give them another chance even with the current deluge of low cost android phones.

I hope they succeed too. These Asha devices show that they are doing their very best to improve the quality of their products and satisfy their customers.