Nokia recently unveiled another handset to its low-end mobile portfolio. The Asha 210 features a WhatsApp hard key for customers in Asia and Africa, while Europe and Latin America get the Facebook button and now the handset is appearing as 'coming soon' on a few Indian online retailers.
The Nokia Asha 210 dual-SIM phone with a dedicated Whatsapp key is good for those who want to stay connected with friends and family on the move.
"We are very excited about our partnership with Nokia Asha complementing our strategy of giving people around the world an easy experience when keeping in touch with their friends," WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton said in a statement, according to GigaOm.
Indian retailers Saholic and InfiBeam have now advertised the Nokia Asha 210 dual-SIM with the 'Coming Soon' label; however, the price and availability of the handset are still unknown.
The QWERTY keyboard of the handset reinstates the older design from previous Nokia phones.
The Asha 210 comes pre-loaded with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The handset features a 2.4-inch LCD screen of QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels), 64MB internal memory and a microSD card that can bring memory up to 32GB. The Asha 210 dual SIM has a 2-megapixel camera and comes with Wi-Fi connectvity, microUSB support and Bluetooth. Unfortunately, the handset is only 2G compatible.
"On a market by market basis we will have either WhatsApp or Facebook. Both of our partners are hugely successful around the world and as we go on a market by market basis, some of our market teams would like to have the WhatsApp variant, some would like to have the Facebook variant. And of course we already have the Nokia Asha 205 on a global basis with the Facebook hard key there as well," said Neil Broadley, marketing director for Nokia's mobile phones division, to TechCrunch.
Not everyone wants to buy a high-end smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, iPhone and more. The Nokia Asha 210 dual-SIM may attract customers looking to buy a second handset or first-time mobile phone buyers.
