This is the first Nokia phone where the company has pulled out all the stops in terms of features: Tri-band, Bluetooth, Edge, memory card, camera, video camera - Finally, I thought Nokia has come out with a phone that can compete with the excellent range of Sony Ericsson phones.
The 6230 has everything you want in a phone for a decent price. Bought mine for 16, 400 rupees ($370) as an upgrade from my trusty and very good Ericsson T-39, mainly because I wanted Edge data speeds on my Hutch network. Phone ships with a 32 MB memory card, stereo handsfree and Nokia PC suite.
First, things that works well:
1. I bought it for Edge speeds and it delivers. In phone browsing is noticeably faster than my GPRS Ericsson T-39 and an SE T610. Connected to a laptop or PC over Edge data service (Hutch Access) the 6230 is effectively as good as a 56K dial up modem - again much better than plain GPRS. If seeing TV clips is your thing then the 6230 delivers on that count.
Signal quality is good.
Speaker phone is loud - though not always clear at high volume.
camera is decent - takes usable 640X480 pics. video camera works - you get grainy video and highly pixelated small video. I believe a newer firmware version has improved on this.
Memory card is a boon. helps you store a lot of stuff helps store MP3s. A 256 MB card can effectively double up as a decent MP3 player. Of course the higher capacity card will cost you about as much a cheap 256MB flash memory-based MP3 player.
Screen is small but decent. Good color and clarity. You can change the font size.
A couple of things that spoils what otherwise would be a great buy.
1. Battery life is terrible. If you talk a lot, use WAP, listen to radio/MP3 or whatever it lasts two days at the best 1 day at worst. Imagine that for a guy coming from using the a lithium polymer battery on the T-39 which needed charging once a week, max twice.
It has bluetooth but trying to configure it to work with PC Suite using an off-the-shelf BT adaptor is a major pain. You need to download software from IBM and crack it / alter it to make it all work.
The phone screen scratches extremely easily. In a month it looked 2 yrs old and I consider myself a careful user. This has led to cottage industry of sorts. Your friendly neighbourhood mobile shop guy will gladly stick a piece of clear plastic tape over your screen for a price if you dont want to change the entire case. Apparently Nokia most Nokia phones come in for this treatment, they tell me.
Phone menu is OK- Nokia doesnt have a lead in user interface the way they used to. The multi-directional middle button isn’t fool proof, very often you end up activating the camera while trying to get into the menu. The call list shortcut only shows outgoing calls - another pain if you’re used to SonyEricsson’s which show incoming, outgoing and missed calls in one list.
In my phone the WAP browser cant open Nokia’s own wap site! every other site works ok though.
Nokia keeps updating the phone firmware - they are a bit like Microsoft - rush product to market then fix. My phone came with version 4.28 and they are already upto 4.43. I haven’t had the time or the courage to upgrade firmware.
After buying the phone I discovered the world of series 40, series 60, symbian etc phone operating systems. And I realized that the 6230 has a series 40 OS, which meant a lot of things I thought I could do with it - like this nifty Kodak picture software that allows you to send phone pics to Kodak for printing via MMS or games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell - dont work because they are all for Series 60 phones.
IMHO the negatives outweigh the positives.
With the 6230, Nokia over promises and under delivers.