. Nokia will Release the Asha 201 in 2012

Nokia today announced a new line of Internet-enabled feature phones for developing countries, the Asha series, which plays to the company's strength in emerging markets. "We can bring data to people who have never had it before," said Blanca Juti, Nokia's vice president of mobile phone marketing.

"The line is blurring between smartphones and mobile devices. There's multiple customizable home screens, very similar to a lot of smartphones," Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said.

The Asha 303 (above) is a QWERTY-packing, touch-screen phone with a sunlight-visible screen, Juti said. The phone also comes with Nokia Maps and the ability to download apps, including a new version of Angry Birds designed for Nokia's Seires 40 feature phones.
Juti said.

The Asha 200 (below) plays on Nokia's recent successes with dual-SIM phones. Nokia has been selling millions of phones with its "easy swap" feature, Elop said. The two phones feature 52 hours of continuous music playback each.

The Nokia Asha 300 will cost 85 euros when it comes out later this year, Elop said. The 303 will cost 115 euros, and the 200 will cost 60 euros. Mary T. McDowell, the Nokia executive vice president in charge of the company’s basic non-smartphone business, which makes up about 60 percent of Nokia’s overall revenue, said the three phones — the Asha 200, the Asha 300 and Asha 303 — aimed to bring the broadband experience of premium smartphones for mass consumers, to whom Nokia remains the largest volume seller.

The phones will sell for as little as €60, or $83.
While the focus of Nokia’s annual conference this week in the London Docklands was on its first smartphones running the Microsoft Phone operating system, the three basic phones unveiled by Nokia may have a bigger, short-term impact for the handset maker.

The devices all use a new Web browser Nokia developed that uses cloud computing centers to compresses Web commands by 90 percent, allowing for faster surfing on 2G and 3G phone networks. The Asha 200 is a touch-screen device with a keyboard housed in a metallic lime green case. It is a dual-SIM card phone, the third that Nokia has introduced this year.

Nokia will introduce a fourth Asha handset, the Asha 201, a single- SIM-card version of the Asha 200, in early 2012.

Sales of dual SIM-card phones, which allow users in developing economies to choose the least expensive operators for calling and surfing, helped Nokia increase the number of basic phones it sold in the third quarter by 8 percent, which helped offset declines in its smartphone business.

Nokia also unveiled the Asha 300 and Asha 303, two 3G phones in metallic red that it plans to sell in developing and mature markets. All three phones run Nokia’s Series 40 operating system, which the company is retaining for its basic lines while dropping its in-house Symbian operating system.

Ms. McDowell said Nokia planned to sell the three cellphones in all markets except the United States, where she said the company’s new line of smartphones bearing Microsoft’s Windows Phone software would eventually lead its re-entry into the American market. Nokia had only a 3 percent share of the North American handset market, and a 1.2 percent share of its smartphone market, in the third quarter, according to International Data Corp., a market research firm.

Alongside the touchscreen equipped Asha 300 and Asha 303, Nokia also announced the Asha 200 feature phone that sports dual SIM support.
The Asha 200 features Nokia's technology that lets a user swap SIM cards without powering off the device, as well provision different settings for each SIM card. Nokia will release the Asha 201 in 2012 that offers the same features save for the dual SIM support.