The Nokia 500 was announced only several days ago, but it has already caught the attention of many geeks with its Symbian Anna OS and low price. HTC is also offering quite an interesting device – the Android-based HTC Wildfire S, which isn’t very expensive and has good features, too.

Let’s try to compare these two entry-level smartphones and see which one is better.

Design

The HTC Wildfire S looks like all the other HTC smartphones based on Android, nothing new or extraordinary. The Nokia 500 is more recognizable, if I can say so, and you’ll never mix it up with any other device. Besides, it has two interchangeable back covers of different colors – you can choose the one that best suits your mood. Do you like it? I do!

Display

Both Nokia’s and HTC’s smartphones have 3.2-inch displays, but the Nokia 500’s screen is more narrow and tall, and its resolution is higher — 360 x 640, while the Wildfire S’s resolution is only 320 x 480. I can’t say which display’s form factor is better – Nokia’s long and narrow one or HTC’s “square” one – it’s a matter of taste. But the higher resolution is always better, so the Nokia 500 is surely a winner in this category.

Processors

The Nokia 500 has a 1GHz processor (it’s Nokia’s first smartphone with such a CPU, by the way!), and the HTC Wildfire S’s SPU is only 600MHz. And no matter how much we say that the number of “MHz”s is not that important (once we compared the 1GHz processor of the Motorola Atrix 4G with the 800MHz processor of the Nokia N8, and the Nokia smartphone won, remember?), this 400MHz difference will surely play its role and affect the smartphone’s performance.

Platform

The Nokia 500, as I mentioned above, is running Symbian Anna, and the HTC Wildfire S is based on the most popular OS nowadays – Android. I can’t say which OS is better – it’s also a matter of taste. I myself prefer Android, but I can’t help mentioning that Symbian Anna is not worse at all – it also has a big number of great features, and Nokia’s Ovi Store offers many good apps and services.

Camera

Both smartphones we’re trying to compare have 5MP cameras with VGA video recording capability. Since the Nokia 500 isn’t released yet, we haven’t seen its camera in work, so we don’t know what images it can provide. However, everybody knows that Nokia has always equipped its smartphones with great cameras (remember the Nokia N8), which HTC has always failed to do. So I guess the Nokia 500’s 5MP camera will be cooler than the HTC Wildfire S’s one…

Other features

I guess we should also try to compare the connectivity features of these two smartphones, though there isn’t much to compare here. Both have microUSB, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth (though the Bluetooth version of the Wildfire S is a bit newer – 3.0 against 2.1). On the other hand, the Nokia 500 has HSDPA connectivity support up to 14.4Mbps, which is two times more than the Wildfire S’s speed.

So… what can I add? These two smartphones seem to be similar in many aspects, but if I were to choose, I would choose the Nokia 500, since it looks better, it has a stronger processor and higher screen resolution. The rest is up to you…