Nokia is obviously betting big on Gaming Elements.
This alongside its array of mobile entertainment sets in a bid to attract the youth to take up its new low-cost (read affordable) handset dubbed the Nokia Asha series. A local app developer such as the consortium that came up with Ma3 Racer that has averaged 870,000 downloads from the Ovi Store since launch is one of the beneficiaries of this line. Nokia has managed to partner with gaming powerhouses such as EA (Electronic Arts), Gameloft, Rovio of the famous Angry Birds, NAMCO BANDAI who are doing big things on Windows Phone and, most recently Zynga who do Farmville; Nokia is able to introduce some of the world’s leading games to the youth consumers on their mobile handsets.
The new famous Nokia Asha touch family range which consists of the Nokia Asha 305, Asha 306 and Asha 311, has been designed to provide a rich, fast and engaging entertainment experience to consumers across East Africa. At an evening bloggers’ event hosted by Nokia dubbed “Gaming with Nokia”, King’ori Gitahi who sits at Nokia as the Product Manager for Nokia East Africa said, “Gaming is a trend that is fast growing in popularity amongst the youth market and we are committed to meeting these needs by delivering the best possible gaming experience. The Nokia Asha Touch range delivers on this promise”. Other than gaming, Asha range is good at browsing. The phones come with a data compression enabled browser which can reduce packets by up to 90% thus significantly lowering data charges on the user without format loss on viewed web pages.
Some of the key points that the Asha Touch series punches on are a new interface that feels good to touch despite it being a lower cost smart phone the best being the simple swipe to activate. This is sort of the same swipe that we saw on the Nokia N9. The main games featured on this series include:
- The exclusive-to-Nokia offer of 40 free to download games from Electronic Arts (EA), featuring titles like Tetris®, Bejeweled®, Need for Speed(TM) The Run and EA SPORTS (TM) FIFA 12
- 22 classic NAMCO BANDAI arcade tiles including PAC-MAN®, GALAGA® and Final Fantasy now available for download from the Nokia Store, ranging in price from USD 0.99 to USD 2.99. This is something between 70 KES and 240 KES.
- Zynga’s global hit games, Draw Something and Zynga Poker, will both be free to download from Nokia Store before long although we will update on the exact timings.
