Video & Gallery: Nokia Asha 501 Dual Sim Unboxing and First Impressions

The other day I stopped by the Nokia Jordan office to pick up the Asha 501 for trial (admittedly I was supposed to stop by almost 3 weeks ago, but then Microsoft happened…). So here’s a quick unboxing of the device, with a few first thoughts below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB_J4wIl96I

My first thought on the 501 is “god this thing is tiny”. Having played with the Lumia 625 for the past few days and generally using the much heavier Lumia 920 as my daily driver I can’t help but think that something is missing in this phone. Of course that’s not a bad thing, it just goes to show how adaptable and relative everything is in the mobile world. The color I got is a sort of Bright red that border lines on being hot pink, with same fluorescence of the 625, but without being so see-through.

The one button layout of the 501 was slightly confusing at first, seeing how it mixes between the swiping gestures to close apps, as well as the back button to back out (the back button functions similar to the WP back button). So there were a couple times I ended up thinking the phone was stuck since I couldn’t “back out” of an app anymore than I already had, until it dawned on me to swipe it shut.

Fastlane, the all in one info and updates screen is pretty cool, I was surprised to see it also shows pictures taken over the past few days (making it a useful one stop center to bring back those drunken blackout nights 😛 ). However I’m having a lot of trouble setting up my email accounts (both Gmail and Outlook) as I keep getting “error setting up email account” issues, but hopefully that’ll work out.

That’s it for now, check out the quick gallery below, and let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to see examined in the 501.

Category: Asha, Nokia