Nokia 500

“Nokia 500 left us with mixed feelings. The spotty web browser and the poor camera performance left a bitter taste and we found it hard to describe the UI as fluid or responsive. In fact, more often than not it was downright laggy. We’ve seen this new 1GHz hardware platform do much better elsewhere so we are willing to blame it all on the non-optimized software that was rushed to the market. Of course that’s where we got our review unit – right off the store shelves. And we have to say, it performed worse than the pre-market sample we previewed earlier. Even the free lifetime turn-by-turn navigation and the brightly colored exchangeable rear covers didn’t make up for the poor impression.”

“The Nokia 500 would reign superior over the entry-level bada handsets of Samsung, for example, and cheap Androids like the Samsung Galaxy Y can only threaten it with the quantity of apps in Android Market, which, however, is a pretty formidable advantage. There is not much else you can buy with similar capabilities to the Nokia 500 in the $200 ballpark without a contract.”