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new products · cell phones · nokia · siddharth raja

Packed with abilities: Nokia's 6230

Snapshot by Siddharth Raja on Friday October 31, 2003.

Nokia 6230Think about what your perfect small (non-smartphone) phone would be. For me, it would have a nice screen, Bluetooth, tri-band GSM, a decent camera, and a MMC slot. I have been waiting a long time for a phone like this. This phone is the Nokia 6230. Not only is it a small form-factor Nokia phone with Bluetooth, but it also features an integrated VGA camera, 65K Color TFT screen, and an MMC memory card slot. Did I mention that it's tri-band and has EDGE data support, too? No? Well that's not all. The 6230 also supports 3GPP video playback and recording, which should look great on the TFT screen.

The 6230 is one one of the handful of small Nokia phones which feature Bluetooth. Nokia claims that the Bluetooth will work with a wireless headset they recently released, but we are unsure whether this means other headsets will work too. It is also one of the first group of handsets which have EDGE support - allowing for download speeds 4 times greater than GPRS. Also, the data synchronization capability allows users of the Nokia 6230 to update personal data remotely over the network. Local synchronization of personal data can be done via Bluetooth, IrDa, or USB with the Nokia PC Suite.

As you have seen above, the 6230 is a very capable multimedia device. One of the main new features is the MMC memory expansion. This will allow users to load videos (3GPP), audio (MP3 or AAC), and other multimedia content on their phone. In addition to enjoying high quality stereo music, music enthusiasts can set their favourite music as wake-up tones as well as alert and ring tones. For MMS, Nokia is using a new SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) format that can compose text, sound, and images in a pre-determined order. There is also a FM stereo tuner built-in, which should make the 6230 one of the most capable small handsets on the market when it arrives. An upgrade of the polyphonics system to play 24 chords (instead of 4 chords on earlier devices) and an integrated handsfree loud-speaker round off the package.

One of the new features introduced in the 6230 is the Wireless Village based instant messaging system with presence functionality. To understand what presence is, I'll first give you an example of what it can do. Basically, it's like this - let's say I set a meeting profile on my phone. That means that I am busy and don't want to be disturbed. This profile is transmitted to a Presence server, and and my friends, with Presence capable handsets, will know that now is not a good time to call, since they will be able to see my status. Instead they should message me. For those of you that use IM chat programs like MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo, Presence is similar to setting your "status".

Finally, it looks like Nokia has implemented some changes to it's Series 40 user-interface. We have mentioned in our previous reviews that a grid-view for the main menu is preferable to having a scrolling menu for many people, since it allows for quicker navigation. We are happy to report that Nokia has taken this step.

So there you have it. An almost perfect small phone. Obviously, we don't know exactly how good (or bad) it is until we review it, but the 6230 is one phone we are very excited about.