Nokia has always been a brand that appealed a lot to me. Innovative, yet intuitive. Functional, yet elegant. In many aspects the 6230 is living up to these expectations set by Nokia’s excellent track record, but it also fails considerably in many others.
I’ll leave the raving to others here.. it looks like the phone has built up enough of a fanbase on Mouthshut to point out all it’s positives; I’ll focus on the negatives instead. Don’t get me wrong, I like this phone, I really do... but there are some points that tend to get on your nerves, especially if you’ve had it for quite some time like I do. If my memory serves me correctly I’ve been carrying this phone around for four months, and these points are starting to become more obvious every passing week.
The Button. I don’t know how to better explain in. In the picture on the left you can see the Nokia. At the top, just below the display itself, is a big button. This is best described as The Button, as you use it for nearly everything: It’s an arrow-controller and press-button in one. Using the arrows is not much of a problem.. push the button upwards to go up, downwards to go down, idem for left and right. The real problem surfaces when trying to use it to actually select the item you’ve carefully positioned the selector over. Because of the sensitivity of the button, your firm ’press’ is oftentimes read as ’left, up, left, press’ or other equally insane combinations of buttonpresses. For some reason this problem surfaces more often outside the phone’s own navigation structure, such as in the games that are provided with it. This brings me to a second point of criticism:
The Applications. The applications that come with the phone are simple, but functional. The main problem I have with them that there are so few, and that obtaining more is difficult. Being a teenager, the apps most interesting for me are the games. On Nokia.com, accessed through the built-in browser, I could only get 2 games... I realize there are content providers that offer additional stuff, for a fee, but really.. any phone I have tried before offered at least a decent selection of free games. Also, with these ’additional content providers’ you never know what you’re signing up for, and how long you’ll be stuck with them.
The Browser. Part of the reason I got this phone was to be able to check up on a few sites while on the road. Well, simply forget it. Nearly all sites I tried so far fail to render on the small screen, and they’re not complicated DHTML/JS sites... just plain XHTML+CSS. The only thing I got to work properly was Fastmail’s WAP interface. Hurray for Fastmail... I really wish I could use Opera Mobile Edition on my phone to browse the web.
The Camera. The camera on this phone is pretty useless. Ultra-low resolution, and because the aforementioned ’The Button’ every picture ends up blurry, because you have to press the button so firmly that the entire camera moves a little, and with the low shuttertime of the camera (which lacks a lens, by the way) this results in horrid pictures. So far I got 15 decent shots, and have taken about 200.
The Filestructure. The phone comes with a memory card. Great. Except that in order to use it, you either have to configure most of the ’apps’ (Voicerecorder, camera, etc) to save it’s stuff there, or have to copy files one-by-one. Not pleasant... if only they would allow you to select multiple files, it would be a snap...
Overall, my judgement on this phone is fairly positive, despite my harsh words here. If you’re simply looking for a phone to make phonecalls with, then the 6230 is a good choice. I did notice there’s a followup model, the 6230i, in which the button-problem is solved. I’m glad someone at Nokia HQ realized that the idea was flawed...
I refuse to comment on Looks & Style, because none of the pre-set options describe what I feel about the phone. It’s not ’ugly’ per sé.. I’d rather describe it as Functional & Clear.