Nokia Launches New Asha Touch Device Range

June 7th Chennai, India – Taking another step towards connecting the next billion consumers, Nokia today unveiled the Asha Touch family of mobile devices in India, introducing the full touch experience at new price points. The two new phone models - the Nokia Asha 305 and Nokia Asha 311 – further expand the successful Asha smartphone familyproviding young, social consumers with a choice of phones to match their own lifestyle. With a focus on being closer to the market, the devices will be manufactured from Nokia’s Sriperumbudur, Chennai manufacturing unit.

“The Nokia Asha 305 and Nokia Asha 311 will provide the Indian consumer with full touch capabilities at new price points and also deliver attractive and intuitive experience for connecting to the internet, to their friends, and to a world of entertainment, web apps and content. We believe the Nokia’s Chennai manufacturing unit has been instrumental in helping us deliver on our commitment to connect the next billion of consumers by helping us meet the increasing demand for the Asha series of devices,” said D Shivakumar, Senior Vice President, IMEA, Nokia.

These latest phones have been designed to provide an incredibly rich, smartphone experiences to consumers who want to be set free from excessive data consumption costs and short battery life. The Nokia Asha 305 and Asha 311 offer a new, fully re-designed touch user interface, combining the proven ease-of-use from Nokia’s heritage with digital design innovations specifically fit for the purpose.

The beautifully crafted Nokia Asha 311 is a fast and fluid 3.5G capacitive touchscreen device, powered by a 1GHz processor to provide a great internet experience. The bright and edgy Nokia Asha 305 is a fun and affordable phone, featuring the exclusive Easy Swap dual SIM.

Great for fast, affordable mobile internet and gaming entertainment

The new devices take full advantage of the Nokia Browser 2.0, a major recent update which uses Nokia’s cloud technology to reduce data consumption by up to 90%, meaning that consumers can enjoy faster and cheaper internet access. Web sites load up to three times faster in comparison to devices without cloud-accelerated browsing, making it simple for users to find and select from more than 10,000 web apps available for download. They deliver a richer and more interactive consumer experience whilst using less data than a stand-alone internet connected app.

Consumers can easily stay connected with friends and family at the touch of a button as well as share files and links across their social networks. Furthermore, the Nokia Browser’s Download Manager feature helps consumers to manage external content easily, saving music, video or pictures on a memory card, while surfing the internet.

The Asha smartphone family is also getting positive support from developers and consumers. Nokia Store has just broken the 5 billion downloads landmark. From January to April, 42% of all content downloaded from Nokia Store was delivered to Asha and other Nokia devices based on the Java ecosystem. Just one year ago, that number was 10%. Also, there are 410 Nokia developers with apps which have achieved more than 1 million downloads. Indiagames and Pico Brothers just passed 100 million.

As well as providing a great, social online experience, the Nokia Asha 305 and Asha 311 have been created with entertainment in mind. All users will receive an exclusive gift of 40 EA games to download for free* and keep forever. These games range across action, arcade and sports, and include titles such as Tetris, Bejeweled, Need for Speed: The Run and FIFA 2012. The Nokia Asha 311 also comes with 15 levels of Angry Birds pre-loaded onto the phone, perfect for making the most of the touchscreen and 1GHz processor.