Nokia 500 Review

With the release of Nokia 500 right after releasing E6, Nokia seems to catch its lost market. Nokia 500 being their first 1GHz Symbian Anna smartphone is based on the current C5-03, with a few minor tweaks and improvements. The Nokia 500 is the mass production of the new Nokia Symbian line, since it has the lowest specifications out of the bunch announced in due course for the holiday shopping craze. Even after having said that, Nokia 500 is no slouch since it boasts a nice display with 229ppi pixel density, 5MP camera and a 1GHz processor, based, but, on the older ARM 11 architecture.

The Nokia 500 appears to make adequate sense even without the latest software. The Finns have more than a small number of basic smartphones whose owners will be pleased at the news of a next smartphone for the masses. The Nokia 500 comes out as a reasonably priced handset from Nokia with sufficient specs along with colorful battery covers to keep the overall package exciting for the teens as well as for the emerging markets.

Furthermore, the Finns have scanted on things like an LED flash, along with the internal memory - the handset owns only 2GB - in order to keep the cost of the handset down.

The retail package of the Nokia 500 is exemplary for the price range. It is a basic package that only holds the essentials. Below are the accessories that you will get with the handset:

• One Nokia 500 Handset
• Two Extra Swappable Battery Covers in Different Colors
• Charger
• MicroUSB Cable
• Stereo Headset With Microphone
• Manual & Warranty Leaflets

The Nokia 500 is a true candy bar phone with its slim rectangular front, however turns it on its face to review the 5MP camera and the speaker grill, along with a nice curved back is unveiled. The narrowing form and soft-touch plastic finish of the battery cover, in addition the fact that the handset is chubby at 0.55" (14.1mm), makes it very comfy to hold and operate with one hand.

Advantages

• It is a nice touch screen bar device with simple styling and economical finish. Furthermore, the rich assortment of colorful back covers provides the Nokia 500 enough youth appeal.
• The curved back makes it easy to hold and the flexible rubbery finish is pleasing to touch although possibly not very durable.
• The front is prevailed by the 3.2" nHD (360x640) capacitive touch screen. The resolution matches the screen size satisfactorily as well as the display comes across good with delightfully vibrant colors and sufficient detail.
• The Nokia 500 feels comfy in the hand and does not bother to carry around. On the whole, it is a simple design that is free of beautifications with a plastic finish. The only notable feature is its exchangeable back covers.

Disadvantages

• Unluckily, the screen glass and the black shiny frame of the Nokia 500 get covered in fingerprints in an instant. Thus the Nokia 500 calls for regular cleaning if you want to keep it looking good.
• The soft rubbery finish of the back cover isn't particularly strong and you can get scratches by simply pocketing it or putting it on tables.

The Nokia 500 is said to be getting Symbian Belle, though that should only happen at the end of the year however in our opinion this would be the best effort for a touch screen Symbian to date on Nokia's part. Symbian Anna runs faster on the Nokia 500 as compared to other similar phones such as Nokia N8 or Nokia C7. The new generation handset sports a 1GHz processor however the overall speed is not as good as on the Nokia 701 with its improved hardware as well as the Symbian Belle optimization, nevertheless that's the price to pay for cheap.

Advantages

• The Anna edition in Nokia 500 brings in a few changes that make Symbian better than its antecedents. Nokia eventually fixed text input although they did not do a faultless job of it. The browser and the other core Symbian apps are modernized.
• The Symbian Anna home screen consists of three panes. You are free to fill it up with widgets and reshuffle them as you see fit. You can delete the ones you don't need but you still can't have more than three.
• Icons in the main menu appear to be more stylish with the Symbian Anna, and now they are more rounded squares. This would generally be the visual change since they are just as easy to hit with your thumb as the old ones.
• The Back virtual key visible makes navigating apps simpler.
• The Nokia 500 comes with a fully functional phonebook, which can easily be synced with your exchange account.
• Symbian has been offering users nearly unlimited phonebook capacity as well as exceptional contact management for fairly some time and at this moment the Anna also improves the SNS integration to bring it more up to date.
• The social network integration incorporates Facebook and Twitter. With Nokia 500 in hand, you can see the latest status updates or at least the first two lines of it right from the contact info. You can tap on it in order to read the complete message or to reply it.
• Voice dialing is available on the 500 and gets activated by pressing and holding the call key on the home screen. It is fully speaker-independent. Furthermore, Smart dialing is also available.
• The Nokia 500 can easily cater for all your messaging needs. You can insert some multimedia content in to the message and the message will automatically be transformed into an MMS and the character counter in that case will turn into a data counter showing kilobytes.

Disadvantages

• Performance wise the Nokia 500 should be better than the previous Symbian^3 and Anna models - since now that it has got a 1GHz CPU.
• The Nokia 500 lacks active noise cancellation.

The 5MP module on the back of the Nokia 500 is satisfactory for casual photo shots. You will simply have to press a little icon on the right in order to get into the full automatic mode with a big fat on-screen shutter button since there is no dedicated camera key. The Symbian Anna browser has an improved interface, but rendering performance and the lack of Adobe Flash support are big limitations. However, the performance on a 1GHz platform is much faster.

Advantages

• The Nokia 500 is equipped with a 5 megapixel camera for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels.
• The camera comes with the complete functionality. On the Nokia 500 you're in charge of white balance, color tone, exposure, ISO, contrast and sharpness. You can also go for one of the preset scene modes and there is an option for creating a custom scene.
• Face detection is also available on the Nokia 500. As for geotagging, it lets you record your current location in the EXIF information of the photos, using the built-in GPS.
• The image quality is good on the phone's nHD screen, however when the photos are stretched on a larger screen, the Nokia 500 images aren't so impressive.
• When it comes to connectivity, the Nokia 500 is a real globe trotter as it comes with all types of network connectivity options - quad-band GPRS and EDGE along with penta-band 3G with HSPA.
• The 3G is pretty fast too with 14.4Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink. Furthermore, you can go pretty much anywhere in the world where there's GSM or UMTS signal and connect.
• USB is version 2.0, with the standard microUSB port capable of charging the phones besides transferring data. In addition to this, Bluetooth connectivity is versio0n 2.1 with stereo support and there's a Wi-Fi b/g radio.
• You can also use microSD card slot in order to transfer your data to and from your Nokia 500.
• The 3.5mm audio port completes the connectivity.

Disadvantages

• The lack of autofocus extends an unlucky trend from most other Symbian smartphones that we have seen in recent times, plus there is no LED flash either.
• The video quality is also unsatisfactory the lack of detail, the high compression as well as the low frame rate bring about extremely disappointing videos.
• The video player is incapable of playing 720p videos or files bigger than 1.5GB or so. But that's hardly a problem, since even 300MB Xvid files turned out to be really hard to handle for the Nokia 500 - dropped frames, choppy videos and lagging sound.
• There is no USB on-the-go support.
• The phone is capable of charging via a standard microUSB charger, but not via a microUSB cable connected to a computer.
• The card slot of the Nokia 500 unfortunately is under the battery, thus it is not hot-swappable.

The default music player of the Nokia 500 boasts decent functionality, for instance equalizer presets, and the CoverFlow-like swiping between album covers is a pleasant eye-candy particularly in landscape mode where it truly shines. The loudspeaker is of standard quality, and could be stronger. There is an FM Radio chip, but no Play via Radio FM transmitter.

Advantages

• The default music player of the Nokia 500 boasts decent functionality, and the much needed eye-candy is incorporated in the form of new Cover Flow-like interface.
• Automatic sorting is also available with the option to create custom playlists straight on the phone. Furthermore, the feature set is complete with the huge number of supported formats, equalizer presets and effects.
• The FM radio on Nokia 500 has the same neat and simple interface. You can search skip preset and new stations similar with sweep gestures or you can use the virtual buttons.
• The 500 has RDS support and automatic scanning for an alternative frequency. This means that if you travel, the 500 should hopefully be able to auto-tune to your selected radio station. On the whole, the audio quality of the Nokia 500 is quite impressive.

Disadvantages

• However, the video player has lots of limitations the video player of the Nokia 500 supports DivX, XviD and MP4, although cannot play larger files properly (if at all), nor is it capable of 720p playback. WVGA clips are the limit.

On the whole, the world's leading phone maker by volume has cut down specifications from the right places to come to its latest entry-level Symbian star, the Nokia 500. The lack of LED flash and the basic video capture capabilities of the 5MP camera module appear to be the major victims that knock down in the search for a low-end pricing. Apart from that we can live with the less RAM along with smaller battery since they don't have an effect on the usability of the handset. What's more, the update to Symbian Belle will speed up the interface quite extensively.

To cut a long story short, Nokia 500 left us with mixed feelings. The patched web browser and the unacceptable camera performance left a bitter taste along with that it is quite difficult to describe the user interface as fluid or responsive. In actual fact, the Nokia 500 was out-and-out laggy but on the other hand, the Nokia 500 appears self-contained to do well in the footsteps of the 5800 XpressMusic, which sold millions around the globe. The Nokia 500 would dominate over the entry-level bada handsets and cheap Androids that can only threaten the Nokia 500 with the quantity of apps in Android Market, which, though, is a relatively formidable advantage. In spite of everything, we are eager to give Nokia 500 the benefit of doubt. Furthermore, we hope that things will only get better by the time the Belle update is released for the Nokia 500 both performance-wise and price-wise.