Nokia Asha 501 Dual SIM Review and Price

Nokia recently announced the dual-SIM Asha 501 smartphone with a fresh single-Swipe user interface. The monoblock touchscreen device brings a new Asha software platform to the users and developers.

Design and Display
Nokia Asha 501 is meant for the youth and first time internet users. The device comes in candy bar form factor with monoblock design. There are no keys peeking out or crevices for dust to get collected in the keys. Nokia's budget phones are known for being strong and survive great falls. The back panel hugs to the body in such a way that even when the phone accidentally slips from your hand, it doesn't come out easily along with the battery. Nokia has used slightly stronger than the regular plastic material with the device.

The back panel has bit of glossy finish which makes it easy to slip out of hands. It measures 12.1 mm thick and the phone is deceptively lighter at 100 grams than it appears. Nokia has placed the volume keys on the right side of the phone with the Power/Sleep key is located just under it.

There is just one hard button under the display. Surprisingly, it is a Back key instead of the typical Home button.

The Nokia Asha 501 has been equipped with a 3 inch QVGA display. The TFT screen with a resolution of 240×320 has a pixel density of 133ppi. The capacitive multitouch screen is fairly vibrant.

Responsiveness is also pretty good but we felt black levels were a bit lacking. Brightness too could have been a tad bit higher. Given the price point of the handset it is hard to find faults in the screen. Outdoor visibility is quite decent as well but could benefit from slightly higher brightness levels.

Hardware
Nokia Asha 501 is the typical small display bearing budget phone just like the predecessors - Asha 311 and Asha 308. The Asha 501 packs 3-inch TFT LCD touchscreen display supporting native resolution of 320x240 pixels.

It might not be the best display out there but the 133 pixels per resolution pixel density is decent enough. We do feel that the display could have been a bit bigger.

Nokia has not specified the processor used and the device packs 64 MB RAM which is decent enough for platform. Nokia Asha 501 supports dual-SIM configuration and requires micro-SIM modules. The SIM card slots and the memory card slot are located under the back panel and are not easily swappable.

The back panel appears to be inspired by one of the Lumia series devices and has a small button that acts out for the speaker. There is a 3.2 megapixel camera without any LED Flash at the rear. There is a 3.5 mm Audio out port on the top next to the standard micro USB 2.0 port. There is no USB-on-the-Go support but the phone does support USB charging.

Nokia has also packed FM Radio in the phone and there are sensors - proximity and accelerometer. The latter is being used by couple of fantastic applications like for composing music while shaking the phone and more. Nokia has packed Bluetooth 3.0 with EDR and supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g for decent mobile web browsing experience.

Software and applications
Files is a great file manager
Nokia has a long tradition of great file managers on S40 and Symbian, which the Asha 501 continues. The app has a very clean interface and first lets you select between phone memory and the SD card. You can mass copy, delete and move items and folders, create new folders and sort by name, size, newest and oldest.

The File manager

QVGA video at 15 fps fails to impress
When it comes to video capture, the Asha 501 was way out of its depth. The camera can produce QVGA (240 x 320) videos with a framerate of 14fps. Sound is recorded in mono at 31Kbps and a sampling rate of 16kHz, the video bitrate hovers around 400 Kbps.
As you can tell, those videos are hardly good for anything and we can't see anyone actually using their Asha 501 for video capture. Still if you are interested in the results you might check out this untouched QVGA@15fps sample video.

Video settings

Data-efficient browser
The Asha 501 has Wi-Fi, but sadly no 3G data speeds. Still, the Nokia Xperss browser uses server compression so it offers a passable experience on EDGEnetworks.
There's tabbed browsing and you can save favorite websites as tiles in an Opera-like speed dial.

Browser

There's a neat start page with categories such as Featured, Mail, Sports, Social Networks, Entertainment, etc. The pull-up context menu gives you quick access to recent, favorites, downloads, web apps and more.

Multimedia
Music player and gallery
The Nokia Asha 501's music player has a neat interface and starts up with album art on top of the available sorting options: songs, artists, albums and playlists. There's no folder view and no additional settings for sound, such as an equalizer

Music Player

The now playing screen shows the timeline, album art, track and artist name, along with four toggles - skip, FF, play/pause and a home icon which takes you back to the start screen. The now playing screen features a pull-up context menu from the bottom of the screen, which gives you options to fav a song, shuffle, repeat and share.

Now Playing

The song will keep playing even if you exit the player - you get a shortcut in the Fastlane and on the lockscreen with play-pause-skip controls readily available.

Music controls in Fastlane and Lockscreen

The gallery on the Asha 501 has two tabs - the all captured tab, which holds all the images and videos you've captured with the Asha 501 and the folder view, which gives you the captured, favorites, modified and received.

Images are shown in a grid of three and are scrollable vertically. You can pinch to zoom on images but strangely double-tap doesn't work here. You can share photos via email or Bluetooth and edit them. Editing options include rotating, flipping, cropping, lighting and contrast adjustment and adding color effects. The edited images go into the Modified folder.

Viewing and editing images

You can set images as wallpapers, add them to favorites, see details and start a slideshow from the pull-up context menu.

Camera
The Nokia Asha 501 is equipped with a 3.15 MP camera and lacks auto focus capabilities. The interface is basic and sports a shutter button, gallery shortcut, zoom slider and a toggle to switch between photo and video modes. Additional settings include a self timer, effects. It is also possible to select the size of the image.

Images are passable and because of the fixed focus nature, you won’t be able to shoot close up photographs with the Nokia Asha 501. The images are nice and vibrant but are fairly lacking in details. It’ll do for the occasional snapshot but little else. Night time images are very noisy and the lack of an LED flash means that you should probably refrain from shooting low light shots with the camera on the Asha 501. Video can also be captured at a very disappointing QVGA resolution. Frame rates are limited to about 15 FPS. All said and done, you probably should’t bother shooting video with the Nokia Asha 501.

Battery
Nokia has held its position strong when it comes to battery in the budget and affordable devices. Though there may not be enough processing muscle, the phones actually last longer than the Android counterparts. Unfortunately, we did not have a second micro-SIM so we managed to test the battery life only on single micro SIM. With a normal usage involving some phone calls, texting, emails, and web browsing activity, the phone lasted for two days. Even with the music listening, the phone managed to go beyond one and a half day easily.

nokia asha 501 dual sim Battery

Nokia has reworked and designed special battery for the Asha 501 - at least that is what we were told. It is a 1200 mAh battery and on dual-SIM configuration should offer more than 8 hours of continuous talk time. We were not surprised with this battery for Nokia promises standby time of a month and a half.

Conclusion
Nokia offers the dual-SIM Asha 501 with headphones and charger for Rs 5,199. The pricing is pretty fair when measured with the value and user experience packed. Nokia also offers 4 GB micro SD card loaded with 50 apps to save you from the trouble of downloading. Yes, the lack of 3G network support is certainly a down side but hey, it offers decent web browsing experience over WiFi network.

Though it is a budget level phone, it aims to deliver the experience and features available in the large screen smartphone device. This phone is ideally meant for the first time mobile web users with minimal usage, students and great second phone for calling, texting and social networking. Nokia Asha 501 is the budget phone to consider when one needs great battery life and with limited budget hovering around Rs. 5000.

Pros	Cons
+ Excellent hardware	- Below average camera
+ Intuitive software	- No 3G
+ Replaceable shells
+ Battery life

View specs of Nokia Asha 501 Dual SIM Click Here