Three things first attracted me to the Nokia Asha 311:
1) It's extremely small size. (~3.5")
2) It's completely unique operating system, Asha OS, designed to bring the design and much of the feature set of larger smartphones to a single-core 1Ghz feature phone.
3) A price tag just a hair over $100. For this low amount, users get to experience an entirely new platform on an unlocked device that costs less than most subsidized on-contract devices cost.
After spending good time with the device, it's clear to me that the Asha 311 neither wishes to compete with smartphones, or to be mistaken for one. That's totally fair for $100, but some of the more worrying flaws of the device have nothing to do with unfair comparisons to more heavyweight hardware.
Certain key device features seem to be either heavily obscured, or left completely out. For instance, why isn't there an easy method to manage data or format memory cards? There's a settings panel for viewing usage, much like Android's. But when it comes to wiping the Micro SD card the best tutorial I found online seemed to suggest that the only method for performing a Micro SD wipe was accessible through the Gallery app. This is odd, since the card is used for a lot more than pictures. To make matters worse, the Gallery app on my Asha 311 refused to open at all. It reliably crashed every time I tried to open it. This was probably due to its trying to render thumbnails of unsupported media -- the media I wanted to wipe off the Micro SD in the first place (just a guess) but this wouldn't have been a blocking issue if wiping the SD card had been properly supported through the Settings menu.
So I can hear you saying, "but Asha OS is young! Nokia will continue to update and support it to fix issues like that."
That's unfortunately untrue, as Nokia's recent acquisition by Microsoft will almost certainly kill off any hope for an update to Asha OS. It is the next promising-but-underdeveloped OS in line to be axed by Nokia execs who seem willing to dump zillions of dollars into early development, but no time or money into supporting and iterating an OS into a success story.
Think about iOS at launch, and how limited that was. Think about Android 1.0 on the G1. Neither of those were stunning. They both lacked polish and basic features, taking years to become the slick and attractive systems they now are.
Nokia has a knack for launching OSes that are actually more polished than either Android or iOS at launch, and then swiftly killing them off without allowing any resources to support their improvement. Maemo, Meego, Asha... All the same pattern. All that hard work being continuously thrown away.
So back to the Asha 311: don't expect any improvement on what comes out of the box. What comes out of the box is a limited, attractive, low-spec entry-level feature phone with a better-than average touch interface that showcases loads of promise which will never be developed further.
The 3 Megapixel rear camera takes fuzzy dim photos that look like they're from a camera-phone from the mid-'90s.
The slick plastic back swiftly becomes a greasy embarrassing mess (beyond the complaints you'll hear about Samsung phones. This is actually worse.)
The app grid interface looks pleasant, and a lot like Meego, but I was unable to locate an option to delete apps, and there were plenty of bloatware game "Demos" making my grid less than attractive. There's also an "EA Games Gift" which supposedly gives you access to a large number of EA Game titles, but touching that icon just forwarded me to a "no results" screen of the Market. Frustrating that I'm stuck with such a useless icon on my app grid.
I found the touchscreen to be nicely responsive, but the frame rate of the OS overall was very low. Felt like moving around the interface was happening at about 15fps.
If you want to spend a little over $100 on a small phone, there are plenty of good options for you, and they're all running Android. You shouldn't feel bad for going mainstream in this case, because what you're doing is supporting an ecosystem that has made time and resources available for quality iteration.
It needs mentioning that if you double your money, you could have a Nexus 4, one of the smoothest, most versatile phones available on the market. It really makes me question the validity of spending $100 on the Asha 311.
