By Stan Schroeder For MASHABLE
BARCELONA: Officially kicking off the Mobile World Congress with its first major press conference, Nokia introduced three new Asha devices, the Asha 202, 203 and 302, and announced the availability of Lumia 900 in Canada and Europe.
The Ashas are Series 40 devices, meaning low-end smartphones and smartphone/featurephone mixes for the emerging markets, with the Asha 202 and 203 falling into the latter category. They are essentially the same phone, with the only difference being easy SIM-swap support in the Asha 203.
They have a numeric keypad and a 2.4-inch touch screen, and come with Nokia Life, a slew of apps and features focused on education, healthcare, agriculture and finance.
These two devices will come with a gift package of 40 popular Electronic Arts games. They will start at 60 euros and should hit the market in about 6 weeks.
Asha 302 is aimed for “hyper-social” customers, Nokia claims. Push e-mail, Twitter and Facebook are preloaded on the device. It has a 1 GHz CPU, which makes it “faster than many low-end Androids,” as Nokia was happy to note. It is powered by a 1-GHz processor and supports 3.5G data speeds.
The device also supports Microsoft’s Mail for Exchange, which makes it much more appealing to business users. It is available right now for about 95 euros.
Finally, the good old Lumia 900 which is already available in the US will be hitting Canada with Rogers In April. In Europe it will be available for 480 euros, and is expected to start shipping in Q2.
