All ABout Nokia 500

[shawn52]

This is a phone from a time before Nokia started to get its act together. While the Lumia 800 and 710 are class acts, the Nokia 500 design harks back to a several smartphone oddities, the ‘plastic paperweight’ Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and the oddly arced Nokia X6. At just 53.8mm wide, it’s remarkably narrow, but the Nokia 500 loses all claim to allure with its bulky 14.1mm profile. By comparison, many new top end smartphones are less than 9mm thick. It looks cheap too, with a thin strip below the screen providing the call, reject and menu buttons, but it is at least reassuringly solid, with everything else aligned sensibly along the top including the charging port, micro USB port and headphone jack. You won’t find much around the back – just an average 5MP camera without a flash. The plastic back panel is smudgy, but can be replaced: you get three different colours in the box: blue, black and red, in line with the Nokia Lumia 710 case options.
Nokia 500 Review

Adding to the budget feeling is the rather disappointing display. It’s reasonably sharp at 360 x 640, and does support pinch to zoom multi-touch gestures in maps and the browser, but it’s deeply recessed which feels odd in use. What’s strange is that despite the bulk of the Nokia 500, the battery inside is so small: just 1110mAh. Symbian is relatively power sipping, and you can still get two days of use on a charge, but it does feel like a throwback to the bad old days of inexplicable Nokia design decisions.