The Nokia 500 is here, with predictable sighs of discontent

Nokia released their “500″ today with little fanfare. The world was waiting for something better. The Nokia 500 seems to be a temporary satisfaction until the N900 gets here.

The latest from Nokia has a touch screen and comes in colors, but is not the Meego powered smartphone that Nokia lovers are craving. This model is in the older exterior mode as well. Nevertheless, for those who like to be able to have their smartphone match their outfit, this could be just the thing to whet the fashionista’s appetite. Nokia is giving the 500 a replaceable back cover that comes in black, white, coral red, azure blue, purple, pink, dark silver and orange. Hot pink is already popular and predicted to be a sales winner for Nokia.

Besides the colors, what does the Nokia 500 have under the hood? The new smartpone has a one gigahertz processor. It is accompanied by a tiny two gigabytes of internal memory. If that turns out to be too little, the 500 has a slot for a MicroSD card, which can boost the memory size to 34 gigabytes. The one gigahertz chip gives the smartphone a good measure of spirited performance because of the use of Symbian for the mobile operating system. Even though Nokia farmed out the Symbian operating system to a third party, there is really nothing wrong with it. It runs just fine and uses little battery juice.

The camera for the Nokia 500 is a five megapixel photo snapper. There is no front facing camera for this smartphone. The camera is pretty much orphaned, that is, it has hardly any features. It has geo tagging, but no flash and no auto focus. It can handle video, but not in high definition. The video feature will record clips at a slow ( for Nokia ) 15 frames per second.

Battery life is a bit higher for this smartphone than for others in its class. The 500 will be able to give up to seven hours of talk time. Average smartphones will give five to six hours of talk. The screen is sized at 3.2 inches of digital real estate. The wireless connectivity is not up to modern standards, but this is not a flagship smartphone. Wi-Fi only goes up to the “G” mode and bluetooth is in version 2.1. The price is agreeable. Nokia offers the handset for €150 Euros, which is $214 at the moment.