Nokia unveiled Nokia Asha 501, the first smartphone to run on the Asha platform at an event in New Delhi in May. At the time of the announcement Nokia said that the phone will cost $99 excluding taxes and carrier subsidies, true to its word Nokia priced this phone in India at Rs. 5,199. I am sure at this price it will find many buyers who are migrating from feature phones to smartphones. Asha 501 is already up for pre-order in India, it listed in Nokia store as well as on Flipkart, the latter put it up at Rs. 5,299 though.
According to the online listing it is expected to release in the first week of July, that is just more than a weeks time from now on.
Asha 501 design is inspired from the recent Lumia design language, if you look at the phone you can immediately notice the similarities. It features a 3-inch LCD screen with QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) resolution and a single button on the front of the device. It weighs just 98 grams with 99.2 x 58 x 12.1mm dimensions. It comes with a 3.2MP rear camera, 64MB of internal memory and support for micro SD card upto 32GB.
Nokia said at the time of launch that they will bundle a 4GB micro SD card along with the phone but there is no mention of it in the listing. It packs a 1200 mAh battery which gives great performance according to Nokia, it gives 17 hours of talk time and 624 hours of standby time. It is available in six different colors: cyan, bright red, yellow, bright green, black and white.
