Nokia today announced its next iteration of Nokia Asha series with the Launch of Nokia Asha 501, at a global launch event hosted in New Delhi India. The event was the biggest one by Nokia in India, clearly showing the importance of India as a market for the Nokia Asha range of phones.

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Nokia Asha 501 comes with 3.0” QVGA TFT Capacitive Display with 240 x 320 pixels resolution, 128 MB Flash, pre-installed 4GB microSD card which can be expanded up to 32GB. Nokia Asha 501 is the first smartphone built on the new Asha platform.The size of the device is quite small to fit into your smallest pocket; to be precise  it is  99.2 x 58 x 12.1 mm with a weight of just 98 grams.

The screen is basically Capacitive Touch  Screen with On-screen Touch QWERTY Keyboard. In terms of connectivity it comes with support for EGPRS, GPRS and WLAN IEEE 802.11 b/g/n.  For charging and data transfer, it comes with Micro USB connector. Apart from these,  3.5 mm Audio Video jack is also there.

It comes with a  3.2 Megapixels fixed-focus camera with 2048 x 1536 pixels resolution.

Battery

The best part, is the Battery backup which is great as claimed by Nokia. If you go by Nokia claims, it comes with a talk time of up to 17 hoursand standby time of up to 48 days for single SIM and 26 days for Dual SIM model. We would like to test this aspect more closely when we get the review device as anyone with a smartphone will know that Battery life is the worst nightmare on a smartphone.

Models

The Nokia Asha 501 is available in single or EasySwap Dual SIM models six colours  i.e. Bright Red, Bright Green, Cyan, Yellow, White and Black.

Apps

Device comes with preinstalled basic apps like twitter, facebook and few others along with some games. Forty free EA Games can be downloadable from Nokia Store using the device.

Availability

Nokia Asha 501 will be available in India in retail stores in June 2013. It is expected to be available through approximately 60 operators and distributors in more than 90 countries worldwidein the same month i.e June 2013.

Pricing

Suggested pricing for this device is $99 USD and if Nokia has done its homework right (which at the moment looks good), it may be able to reach to small end customers who don’t want to spend much on a mobile device still want features of a smartphone.

If we talk about pricing in terms of Indian Rupees, it will turn out to be in the range of 5K- 6K INR and the Market price will be much lower than the MRP soon.