Nokia Asha 303

The touchscreen offers the trademark Nokia haptics we’ve been consistently impressed with.

They have been touch optimized as well, though we wish the countdown timer used the same big numbers as the Alarm clock.

Kinetic scrolling is available and zooming into photos (via on-screen shortcuts) is relatively quick, but the animation for both isn't particularly smooth.

They are still behind the big players in the app store game, but for a featurephone having an app store at all is more than we expected.

Emails are received in the background and you can put a Mail widget on the homescreen to keep track of new emails (the widget offers practically no info on the new emails though).

Songs can be filtered by artist, album and genre.

It’s the kind of quick menu we’ve seen on many S40 handsets but touchscreen makes so much difference.

As we expected, the limited XviD support from the Touch and Type series is back, but it is now accompanied with DivX too.

The Nokia Asha 303 touchscreen calculator is brand new but has lost the advanced functionality (you only get the four basic math functions).

The reception on the Nokia Asha 303 was consistently good and in-call sound was crisp and clear, though not as loud as we would have liked.

Photos are quite noisy but the post processing manages to mask a lot of it, at least in bright areas.

If anything about it comes close to that though, it’s the build quality.

The color contrast between the keyboard and the glass covering the touchscreen creates an impression of a QWERTY slider, rather than a simple candybar.

The QWERTY messenger isn’t remarkably slim but the curved shape gives it a rather comfortable fit in the hand.

The illusion is reinforced by the screen coating edging above the top row of the keyboard.