Nokia Asha 201 review

Let's start with the bad news. Video playback on the Nokia Asha 201 isn't much cop. In fact, the video player is hidden away in the camera app rather than being given a status all of its own. It is clearly designed primarily for playing back videos shot on the handset itself.

Most of our test videos wouldn't play - even our MP4 videos were too large for the Asha 201 to cope with - and it appeared only to want to handle small size, low frame rate videos on a par with those the handset can shoot itself.

In any case, the 2.4-inch screen isn't one you'd want to use to catch up on your favourite films or TV shows.

Music was an altogether better prospect, with our MP3 files playing very nicely.

Album art was a mystery to the player, but with playlist management and volume control on the D-pad (there's no side button for this), we have all we really need from a basic player.

There's an FM radio too, which automatically tunes stations when it's first used.

We'd really have liked an easier way to switch between headset and speaker output for the radio. Having to press 'Options', scroll down to 'Settings', then scroll down to 'Play via' is a bit of a pain.

And of course when you want to switch back you have to go through the whole process again.

The player is a bit bland looking too, although we like the RDS.

Nokia provides a surprisingly good headset for a handset of this price. It's not top notch, but it does a reasonably good job, and sound is definitely less tinny than it is through the Nokia Asha 201's own speaker. Volume through the handset speaker goes pretty loud, though.

As we said before, the Nokia Asha 201 has 10MB of built-in storage, which won't enable you to save much in the way of media content. A microSD card slot offers the chance to boost this capacity, though.