The Panasonic X500 mobile phone is a small but ‘fat’ slider phone released a long time back, it is currently selling for about $190. The phone weighs about 96grams which is not that heavy but from the looks it seems much more. It measures close to 85 x 47 x 22.5 mm. The Panasonic X500 mobile phone comes with a 65k color TFT screen with a display resolution of 128 x 128 pixels.

The Panasonic X500 mobile phone comes with a lot of pre-installed themes, wallpapers and logos. It has only 4mb of shared internal memory and no memory card slot to supplement it. The Panasonic X500 mobile phone comes with GPRS, but there are no other data networks or data transfer ports available in the phone. It has a WAP / xHTML browser for browsing the internet. The phone is available in white, silver and red colors. The 5-way navigation key is quite comfortable to use and is spaced out.

In camera mode, it's used on its side with a handy shutter button in the usual place. A rubber strip on the front of the camera (back of the phone) makes it comfortable for manicured hands to hold, and the TFT screen makes an excellent viewfinder with a healthy refresh rate. There's also a built-in photo light for stopping deer in their tracks.

Disappointingly, the pictures are only VGA, but they're fairly decent for a non-megapixel phone. Likewise, the video camera (restricted to ten-second clips) is of reasonable quality but only captures stamp-sized catwalk footage. After that, it starts to go a bit downhill. The menu is convoluted, the picture viewer average and text messaging a chore. The casing and controller are plasticky and the keypad is cramp-inducingly small - a real pain for texting. Given its good looks, the price tag seems a steal, but don't be wooed by the picture on the box - in the hand it feels cheap.

The Panasonic X500 mobile phone has a good battery life like Panasonic’s other phones. The battery of this one can last upto 7 hours of talktime and over 200 hours of standby.