Nokia has always been known to come out with handsets for everyone. Nokia 500 is one such offering from the Finnish cell phone manufacturer which has been targeted towards users looking forward to experience smartphone for the first time. Nokia 500 is the mass production of its Symbian line of phones. Simplicity is the hallmark of this phone. But in the market which is flooded with smartphones of higher class and features, does Nokia 500 stand any chance. Check out our exclusive Nokia 500 review to know what the phone has in store for you.

Nokia 500 Looks And Design

Nokia 500 has a youthful appeal thanks to its colorful back. It is a reasonably compact phone measuring at 111.3 x 53.8 x 14.4 mm and is quite light on pocket as it weighs just 93 grams. It is a conservatively designed phone and its curved rear makes it pretty comfortable to grip. The soft rubbery finish makes the phone pleasant to grip but this reduces the durability.

Because of the glossy frame of the phone, it easily picks up fingerprints and the soft rubbery finish is not that strong and we found that after we kept it on table, the rubber got scratched. The phone feels comfortable to grip and it is not a hassle to carry it around. The design of the phone is neat and simple.

Nokia 500 Display

Nokia 500 mobile phone displays a 3.2 inches TFT capacitive touch screen which displays 16M colors of resolution measuring 360×640 pixels. The colors displayed are quite nice and vibrant and produce enough details. However, sunlight legibility is an issue with the display and on most of the occasions, when you take the phone outside in direct sunlight, you need to keep brightness to the maximum level. Thanks to the 229ppl pixel density, one can read small texts pretty easily. Below the display you get the two call buttons, with Menu key in between while above the display bezel lies the Nokia 500 microphone. The earpiece is located above the display which also houses the ambient light detector and proximity sensor.

Nokia 500 Apps

Though Symbian is one of the most popular OS in the world, yet when it comes to apps then it is pretty barren as compared to Android or Apple’s iOS. However, Nokia has refreshed the Ovi store interface to make it more user friendly for Symbian^3. However, limited number of applications is still a problem. The default screen of the phone shows a list of featured apps or the apps which you can browse in the Ovi store by categories namely, Games, Apps, Video Content or by collection. Ovi Maps navigation is free for all their smartphones which is included in Nokia 500. There are various social networking apps such as Facebook and Twitter in the phone.

Nokia 500 Features

Lets us first take a look at the OS of the phone. Nokia 500 cell phone runs on Symbian Anna OS which runs faster on it as compared to Nokia N8 or Nokia C7. The phone also features a 1GHz processor as opposed to 680MHz in older generation phones. It has a split screen and a portrait virtual keyboard which is pretty good. The keys are well spaced out and sending mail and typing messages on it gives a very good experience. The internal memory of the phone provides storage of 2GB which can be increased to 32 GB with the help of a microSD card.

It comes with a fully functional phonebook. Of late Symbian has been offering phonebook of unlimited capacity and great contact management for quite sometime and Anna improves upon this. You can order the contacts either by first or last name. One can assign personal ringtones and videos to contact details. The software of Nokia 500 also supports several email accounts and various security protocols.

Nokia 500 Image Gallery

The image gallery of the phone is also quite good and you can select multiple photos for sharing or deleting. You can also send the photos through MMS, email or Bluetooth.

Nokia 500 Camera

The phone is equipped with a 5 MP camera which shoots pictures of maximum resolution measuring 2592×1944 pixels. We were disappointed to note that the camera lacks autofocus and LED flash. Lack of LED flash virtually rules out clicking photos in dark. It however is equipped with features such as geo-tagging and face detection. The images look quite well the phone’s screen but when they are stretched on large screens then they are not so impressive. The colors however are quite decent and so is the contrast. Noise levels are very high and because of lack of autofocus, taking close up shots is a problem.

Nokia 500 Video

Video quality of the phone is not impressive. The phone shoots VGA resolution videos at 15fps which is nothing exciting. The video quality is also quite disappointing as it suffers from lack of details and low frame rate.

Nokia 500 Connectivity And Multimedia

The phone provides you all the connectivity at your disposal.  You get the quad band GPRS and EDGE along with penta band 3G along with HSPA. Connectivity is also consolidated by the presence of USB 2.0 along with a standard microUSB port capable of charging phones apart from transferring data. One also gets Bluetooth 2.1 with Wi-Fi b/g radio. Connectivity tally is completed by 3.5mm audio port.

The web browser of the phone has some really nice interface and it offers nice features such as different sizes of fonts. Panning in the browser is quite smooth but zooming it can be slow at times. Integration of the QWERTY keyboard inside the browser also impressed us. However, we did not like the web browsing experience on the device, be it panning or scrolling.

The default music player offers decent functionality such as equalizer presets and the loudspeaker is of average quality, though we felt that it could have been stronger. There is also an FM radio chip. The video player supports only MPEG 4 files and you will also get picture and video editors pre-installed. The performances of these are enhanced by the presence of 1GHz processor.

Nokia 500 Colors

The phone is available in black/white with covers in

• Black
• Azure Blue
• Corel Red
• Orange
• Khaki
• Green
• Pink
• Silver

Nokia 500 Accessories

During Nokia 500 unboxing, we found the phone to be equipped with the following accessories

• Nokia 500 smartphone
• Wall Charger
• MicroUSB cable
• Stereo Headset with microphone
• Manual
• A Couple of Extra Swappable Battery Covers in various colors

Nokia 500 Launch Date

The phone has been released sometimes in September 2011.

Nokia 500 Battery Life

The phone is powered by a standard Li-Ion 1110mAh battery which offers a talk time of around 7 hours when the phone is operated on 2G and up to 5 hours when operated on 3G.

Nokia 500 Price

Nokia 500 price in the USA is approximately $ 200 while price of the phone in India is approximately Rs 10,000.

Nokia 500 gave us mixed feelings. While the poor performance of the camera and the web browser left us disappointed the improved performance of Symbian Anna pleased us. The nice build of the phone and the rich pixel density impressed us and overall we feel that if you are looking forward to have a smartphone experience, then you can surly bet for Nokia 500.