Nokia6230

Revision as of 15:34, 7 August 2004

It was roughly in the middle of 2004 that Nemo got himself a new phone. A nokia 6230.

This is his review.

It is of course much easier to critisize than to praise, since the things that annoy are easily and repeatedly noticed, while the thinsg that are good just become commonplace and unnoticed. You use them because they work, and you don't have to think about them. So if this review focuses on the negative, remember that and keep in mind that I consider this an excellent phone - indeed, easily the best of any that I've owned (not that I've owned alot, but hey :)

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6230-566.php Read a longer more formal review of the phone

So what could be better about this phone? Well first up, let's talk size. I'm sure that Nokia could have squeezed a bigger screen into it. The Sony Ericcson T610 and T630 are physically smaller phones (albiet by about 1mm in any dimension), and yet has a larger screen. On the other hand, those phones have buttons and joysticks which haven't impressed me on the very little I've used them, while the 6230 has nice buttons with the right amount of 'clicky' businesslike feel about them. So maybe that was the tradeoff. No silly 'we went for a funky keypad shape for the sake of being DIFFERENT' philosophy here. The interface is Symbian series 40 - so it's designed for the 128x128 screen and is thus limited in third-party apps (even though the phone has plenty of power - it can decode mp3 for ringtones for example) which seem to be aimed more at the larger screened series 60 UI. To be fair regarding screen size, nokia seems to be standardising on series 40/60/etc phones - and they may have been able to fit a larger screen on this phone, but NOT one large enough to be series 60 (208x176 pixels if I recall).

The UI is generally usable, and strikes me as being an obvious extension of the 'traditional' nokia UI which I first saw on the 5110, and have since used on my older 3330 and 3350 phones.

So let's get into the nitty gritty of 'problems' shall we? Remembering of course, that most are really quite minor UI inconsistencies) and I've seen far more successfull devices with (IMHO) far greater problems!)

Minor issues

• The countdown timer does not alert you if the phone is off. The alarm does - so why is the timer any different?
• The T9 text prediction is great, but ONLY seems to exist for writing messages (SMS and MMS). It's not in many other text input areas where it would be nice. This is arbitrary as far as I can tell?
• The D-pad has some neat way of determining if a direciton-followed-by-a-click-in is really just meant to be a 'click in' and it then ignores the direction key first. (I suspect it just checks for simultaneous clicks or something relatively trivial like that... however, this great feature doesn't exist when you're inside java midlets - so there is a sudden percieved INCREASE in dpad sensitivity (and hence mistaken button pressing) when inside midlets.
• When an image has been used as wallpaper, and I want to delete it - I not only have to remove it as active wallpaper first, but then also POWERCYCLE the phone before the image can be deleted. huh?!
• I can set the timeout on the screensaver (changes image only) and auto-keypad-lock features, but not on the backlight shutdown, or the 'it's the REAL screensaver' which is a nice digital clock. Again, this seems arbitrary. Speaking of that screensaver, why do I just get the time and not the date as well? There is plenty of screen room to play with, and I got the date on a previous phone (3350)
• The 'goto' menu is a great way of shortcutting to commonly used functions in the phone, without having to go through the 'normal' menus. I use it all the time. When you enter a function via this 'goto' menu, and then back out of it, you return to the goto menu. EXCEPT the gallery function, which backs out to the menu location where it was found. huh?!
• The phone doesn't seem to alert me (like the doco says it should) that my MMS memory is full. :(
• Browsing the phone via bluetooth connection from computer, I can only see the phone memory, not the MMC slot memory. This makes for increased fiddling to get stuff between computer and MMC slot. (short of buying an MMC card reader for computer and removing card from phone when I want to transfer. That would ALSO be annoying, since the MMC is behind the battery
• The 'warning' alert tone (like when battery is low, or you've just locked/unlocked the phone) seems to randomly change between a pleasant tone, and an unpleasant squeal.

Serious bugs

• I've managed to get the phone in some state such that when the 'games' area has a bookmark, the softbuttons on the phone crash it. Remove bookmark, and the softbuttons are fine!