Nokia Asha 501 Dual SIM Hand On Review : Stylish, All Rounder Budget Phone

Screen

The phone has a tiny 3-inch TFT unit of QVGA (240 x 320) display. It delivers around 133 pixels per inch ppi, which despite being low-resolution display, is good for this price range. Even though visuals are sometimes dull, everything is readable and neat. There's a proximity sensor in the phone, causing the screen to turn off during calls.

Touch Response

Moving onto its capacitive screen, the device has decent touch sensitivity. It is usually smooth and responds promptly without any choppiness. We don't really expect anything greater at this price point. However, owing to the small screen size, typing on the phone is sometimes hard, even for people with small fingers. Users will find themselves making errors every now and then. So yes, testing on this phone is a bad experience.

Slots

Pop the back open and you'll find a SIM card slot and an SD card slot and. The device offers 128MB for internal storage. However, you can always add a microSD card and expand storage up to 32GB. Also tucked behind the back cover is the device's only speaker. Audio sounded clear and loud, even when we played music.

Asha OS

The phone utilizes Nokia's Asha 1.0 operating system. Again, the OS's design scheme looks like it was inspired by Lumia's Windows 8 Phone. As on many other phones, the lock screen displays the time and even notifies you about messages, calendar events, missed calls and other alerts. You can also lock your device with a security code.

What we liked about the OS is that it has two home screens. The first one being the app launcher and the second being Fastlane, which serves as an activity log. It displays recently opened apps and other recent phone activity in chronological order. It also lets you know about social network updates, posts, upcoming birthdays and events form your calendar. Even the music player will appear on the fastlane if you have recently played a track.

When you swipe the phone at the edge of a screen, the phone goes back to the home screen. This feature proved to be a little annoying since one tends to accidentally swipe the screen's edges now and then while using apps.
Swipe down from the top of the screen and you'll bring down the notifications bay. This area also contains controls for Wi-Fi, data, sound and Bluetooth.

We liked the selection of wallpapers included in the device, as they went along with rest of the user interface rather nicely.
The options in the 'Settings' menu proved to be rather detailed. Apart from settings for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Flight Mode and Appearance, there's a detailed section for SIM cards. You can choose a new name for the SIM, decide whether or not it should be used for data-connectivity and also configure PINs and change network settings. The phone also comes with a data-counter, which allows you to keep a track of your data usage.