Nokia had announced back at the MWC that it will expand its Asha series of phones further with newer products. One of the new products, Asha 303 has now been released in India. Check out the price and specs after the break.

Nokia 303 is a 3G phone which offers Touch-and-Type facility. It comes with the DRM-free Nokia Music Unlimited service, which allows the user to download unlimited music for free. It will also have Zenga TV and Whatsapp preinstalled on it. The Capacitive Touch-screen is a 2.6-incher and has a resolution of 320×240 pixels. The keypad below the screen is a Qwerty-keypad, which is surprising for a Touch-and-Type phone. Other hardware specs include a 1 GHz chip buffered by 128 MB of RAM and offers 100 MB of internal storage. It does provide memory-expansion facility up to 32 GB through microSD cards. It has a 3.2 MP camera with fixed focus. It features HSDPA and HSUPA connectivity with a maximum transfer rate of 10.2 Mbps. Other than 3G, it also offers WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, FM with RDS and USB 2.0 connectivity. It is powered by a 1,300 mAh battery which is rated to deliver up to 47 hours of nonstop music playback and 720 hours on standby.

The phone is priced at Rs.8,999/- which should find a sweet spot in the Indian market, though Lumia 610 is equally great and comes for about 2k more bucks. Its form factor is a bit queer and feels really clumsy. Cramming a Qwerty keypad with a touch-screen, both on the same plane is quite a gamble Nokia has chosen to play. It perhaps wanted to please many types of customers at once- Qwerty lovers, touch-screen lovers, 3G fans and people on the verge of buying a smartphone but being reluctant due to their prices. Let’s see how this handset fares!