Nokia Reinvents The Asha with Asha 501

  • Unveiled in India by CEO Stephen Elop
  • Asha platform
  • Features two home screens

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop just unveiled today the latest Asha phone in Nokia’s lineup at an event in New Delhi, India.

  • Unveiled in India by CEO Stephen Elop
  • Asha platform
  • Features two home screens

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop just unveiled today the latest Asha phone in Nokia’s lineup at an event in New Delhi, India.

The Asha 501 is the first product of a new generation of Ashas with a brand new platform whose design is inspired by Lumia. The new interface focuses on swipe events and a new feature called Fastlane.

The Nokia Asha 501 is made from two parts to increase its durability with a removable back to give users access to the microSIM slot and a microSD card slot that can support up to 32GB. The new feature phone sports a 3.2MP fixed-focus camera, 2G connectivity, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0.

The phone features two home screens, on the one hand, you have your traditional app drawer that list of apps while on the other is a new feature called Fastlane that shows users currently running apps, messages and other notifications a user has received.

As with previous Asha models the 501 will have a number of social platforms including Facebook, Foursquare, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube out of the box. Moreover, the 501 will utilise Nokia’s Xpress browser and Xpress Now apps to make do with the lack of support for higher data transfer speeds.

A dual-SIM version with hot-swappable functionality (users can change SIM cards without having to remove the battery) is also expected to be released sometime in the future.  The new Asha 501 will make use of a 1200mAh battery which according to Nokia can last for up to 48 days in standby mode.

The Nokia Asha 501 will start shipping in June in 90 countries on 60 operators and will cost around $99 before taxes and subsidies for the single SIM version.