NOKIA 6230

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The 6230 has long been considered by some to be the second coming of the savior as far as mobile phones are concerned. The spec sheet certainly is impressive. Small, light, 65k color display, camera with video, radio, MP3 player, and the all-important MMC card slot.

But living up to the hype is never easy, and specs alone do not make a great handset. So how does the 6230 stand up? Let's see....

Multimedia

Multimedia is really one of the things that Nokia is touting about the 6230. I mean to say, it does everything. Pretty much. A number of things in this department set the 6230 apart from the prior Series 40 Nokia handsets like the 7250. For one, the display has been upgraded to a 65k color unit, even though it is still relatively small and only of 128x128 resolution. While this is still much better than the 4k color units Nokia had been using, it certainly is not one of the better 65k displays on the market. In fact, I would say it is one of the weaker ones. But still an improvement over the other Series 40 devices.

Of course the camera is meant to be one of the big draws of the 6230 (though not the biggest), and it is obvious that Nokia has listened to some of the complaints heard regarding their other cameraphones. The 6230's camera is a VGA type, meaning it shoots photos of 640x480 pixels. It has most of the standard features you would expect, including a fairly capable night mode. The Portrait mode (80x96 pixels) is also pretty good. But otherwise, the image quality is not all that impressive, like with most VGA cameraphones. The color is usually very good, and the white balance does a pretty good job of dealing with indoor lighting (even if the outdoor shots are a bit blue'ish), but the details of the images are very sketchy. You'll be able to get a good feel for that when you look at the Color Wheel test shot later in the story. Not the worst I have seen, and maybe ok for faces, but not that usable if you need any kind of detail in the photo.

Photos on the high quality setting range from 35 to 60k in size. 10 seconds of video is anywhere from 45 to 65k or so. Muting the microphone can save 30% in size.

One of the things that the 6230 does pretty well, though, is related to that same camera. The 6230 does a good job with video clips, playing or recording them. The 15 second MMS size video clip limit is gone. You can now record clips up to 4 minutes in length, provided you have the memory for it. You can even turn off the microphone on the clips. This is great, and something that all of the manufacturers should pay attention to. Not only can you get rid of distracting background noise when sound is not what you are trying to convey, but the lack of audio greatly reduces the size of the video clip. How cool is that?

These photos and video clips can all be easily sent to your friends via MMS, IR, or Bluetooth. I ran into no complications at all, which is nice. But you can't even start if you don't have the storage space for these things, and that's one of the places where the 6230 really shines. Not only was there 7MB of free storage memory in the handset, but the included 32MB MMC card allows you near limitless expansion.

Lastly we have the audio. This is the real selling point for the 6230. The 6230 not only has a FM radio built-in, but it has the ability to play both MP3 and AAC audio files - in stereo. The FM radio is standard Nokia fare. You can define a multitude of preset channels, and name them what you like, and it supports manual, automatic, and direct frequency tuning. You can even use the capable internal speakerphone for the output, but you are still required to have the included wired headset attached since it acts as the antenna. In general I do no like the headset, and since it is a pop-port type, you can't replace it with your own favorite store bought headset.

The MP3 player is the more important audio application, though, and you don't need an antenna for that. While I didn't find the control and track list editor to be all that good, they are workable. The player has an equalizer function, but it seems to have limited impact on the sound. I imagine that is more a function of the headset than the audio, though. Just my guess. A couple of odd things about the player: it can not be put into the GoTo menu that is accessed with the left softkey (even though the Radio can), and it can not function while the camera is on. Otherwise it works ok. It even shows the name of the track that is playing on the phone's standby display. Like the radio, the MP3 player can use the built-in speakerphone for audio. The sound quality seems to be significantly better when the phone is sitting on its back on a table. Not sure why that is, but it seems that way to me. You Bluetooth fans will be pleased to know that you can listen to the audio on your Bluetooth headsets, too. It won't be stereo, and the quality will be a bit lacking, but often that is better than nothing.

If you upload new tracks to the phone and don't see them, use the refresh option to get the player to reload everything to find them.

Of course with all that audio capability, it goes without saying that the 6230 supports polyphonic ringtones. I found a number of "normal" tones that sounded like traditional phones that I liked. There were a variety of tones on the phone, and a few others can be downloaded from the Nokia WAP site. The ringtones weren't the loudest I've heard, but I think there are good enough. The novel design of the speaker opening on the side of the device seems to do a decent job of keeping the sound from getting muffled out when the 6230 is in your pocket.

Physical

Now onto the more mundane side of the 6230, its physical being. A lot of the opinions you'll read here are just that, opinions. But I think a lot of people will agree with me on many of the points. Certainly not everybody, as tastes vary, but I think "most" will tend to agree.

I do not find the 6230 to be very attractive. I've seen the black version, and that is an improvement, but I am just not wowed by this retro, plain-jane look. The unit I tested was a combination of beige and silver, which I don't find to be a good combination, owing in part to the lack of contrast between the two. But overall I just find the design uninspired, especially for Nokia - the people that brought us the circular keypad of the 3650 and the taco shaped 7700.

But I could live with the look, quite honestly. I probably view phones as more of a utility device than many. But that is where my real problem with the 6230 comes into play. The utility. The keypad and d-pad. The keypad on this device is not worthy of one of Nokia's 3000 series phones, let alone a phone like the 6230. The keys are attached to what is very obviously a thick, rubber base, and they feel very wobbly. They can be moved around way too easily. This is is made worse by the lack of support between the keys in each column. That is to say there is nothing separating the 2 and the 5 key. There is a bit of the cover between the keys left and right of each other, but that is not enough. The directional controller (or d-pad) suffers from the same problem of the wobbles. It is just not solid enough. The feedback is poor, even though it usually manages to not register a false direction when you are pressing the d-pad to select a menu option.

Most of the rest of the physical aspect of the 6230 is good, though. The on/off button is large and easy to use. Finally. The volume control on the left side has a nice feel to it, even if it doesn't really look like a typical volume control. The camera lens on the back is raised from the rest of the cover a bit, and that piece wraps around the side to merge with the speaker's grill. I suspect that this design is not purely aesthetic, and that it has some effect on the quality of the speaker's sound. Some people will miss the lack of a dedicated camera button. I didn't. The now-standard pop-port is located on the bottom of the device, of course, and there is a button on the back for the removal of the back cover. Getting the back cover off of the 6230 is not always easy, but most people won't be switching around SIM cards as often as I tend to.

What you won't find on the exterior of the 6230 is a slot for the MMC memory card. That card goes into an indentation located underneath the battery in the rear compartment. Unlike with the N-Gage, this is not that big of a deal since you are not likely to be swapping cards out all that often.

Keypad aside, the overall fit and finish of the 6230's exterior is quite good. Everything fits well, and is quite functional, if not exactly drop-dead gorgeous. The 6230 is a bit thicker than a 6610, but just barely. They are really quite comparable in size. My test unit weighed 98.2g with a SIM and MMC card installed, a tad over the claimed weight of 97g.

UI

Not much is new as far as the user interface is concerned. After all, that is much of the idea behind Series 40 in the first place. People will know how to use it. There have been some changes, though, since the 6230 is using the second version of Series 40. Some of those changes are good, some are not good enough, some just shouldn't have happened.

One of the changes in the new version of Series 40 is the ability to view the main menu in a grid of icons format instead of only in the "one item per page" method that most Nokia devices have always used. This is nice, especially for people coming from Sony Ericsson or Siemens phones. It is not quite finished, though. Pressing the number 5 on the keypad will not select the 5th/middle icon in the menu. Instead, it dials a 5. This means that if you want to get to the icon in the bottom right corner, you have to move right twice, and down twice (since it defaults to the upper left). In all honesty, you can get there quicker by going left from the upper left corner, but that is not quite intuitive and does not hold true if your SIM card has SIM services on it. Having that feature on your SIM actually adds a 10th icon to the menu, a 4th row of icons that you have to scroll down to get to. In any event, you get the point. The icons should be linked to the keypad for quick access. They keypad digits were linked to the menu items in the old Series 40 system, so why should that not be the case now?

[Correction, pressing a keypad button will take you to an icon, but only if you press the keypad within 3 seconds or so. If you wait too long it will assume that you want to dial the number. Since I was taking my time in the menus (taking notes and such), I was not moving fast enough to get it to work. I would still argue that this is inconsistent, and a "bad thing", but it won't be an issue to most once they get used to the phone. -editor]

When talking about the MP3 player earlier, I mentioned that it could not be added to the GoTo menu. The GoTo menu is another new aspect of Series 40 that was missing on devices like the 6610 that did not have a select function built into the d-pad. Since the d-pad can be used to bring up the main menu, the left softkey is free for other uses. The GoTo list allows you to assemble a list of frequently used functions. Not everything is available for inclusion in this list, but most things are.

The directions of the d-pad itself will allow quick access to some features, such as the calendar and the camera. The right softkey can also be changed to your liking.

One downside of the new d-pad select mechanism is that sometimes the UI seems a bit inconsistent now. For example, you might pull up a list of options with the left softkey. If the first option is what you want, you will likely feel tempted to press the left softkey again to select that option. It is what you would have done on an earlier Series 40 device, at least. But now it does nothing. You have to use the d-pad to select that option, which continued to bother me during the entire week that I was using the phone.

Theme support in Series 40 is gernally pretty bad, and that is the case with the new version of Series 40, too. Themes set only colors and do not have any impact on the icons or backgrounds used in the system. While this is better than nothing, it is not as good as what can be found in many other handsets these days.

In addition to its multimedia capabilities, the 6230 also excels as a normal phone. I was pleased with the performance of all of the handset's basic phone features. Audio quality during calls was quite good, backed up by overall good reception abilities (on the 1900Mhz band, at least). The built-in speakerphone, as I have already mentioned, performs quite well for output. What the remote caller hears when you are using the speakerphone is not quite as clear, but it seems to be more than adequate. It is easily activated during a call by simply pressing the right softkey button.

The 6230 has 5 profiles available, all of them user editable. The profiles can be used as timed profiles, if you like, so that you can have the phone revert back to the normal profile from your meeting profile once your appointment is over. This is pretty handy for a business user, and prevents you from missing a call later in the day because you forgot to turn off the silent profile.

The contact system is good overall. In each contact you can store multiple numbers, an email address, and even a street address if you like. Synchronization with Microsoft Outlook on a PC was a snap with Nokia's included PC Suite software. The PC Suite also allows you access to media converter and other tools for managing your phone from your computer. There is a bug in the contacts system, though. When you try to access the caller groups function, you will be sent back to the standby display. To get around this, do a "Restore Factory Settings" from the Settings menu when you first get your 6230. The Caller Groups function will then work fine.

One of the things that pleased me with the 6230 was the voice dial and command capabilities. Unlike my 6820, there seems to be no fixed limit as to the number of voice dial and command tags that you can define. I had tags for many functions (such as profiles and Bluetooth) created, in addition to tags for phone numbers. Unlike Sony Ericsson phones, each voice dial tag is associated with a particular number, not a contact. This means you need to define "Fred Mobile" as well as "Fred Office" if your buddy Fred has multiple numbers where he can be reached. Some people will prefer this method, I prefer the other. Both work. In any event, the recognition was spot on every time - with or without a headset. If you don't like using your voice to dial, you can define speed dials to be associated with the keypad digits.

The 6230's battery life seemed acceptable, but I was unable to test it properly for lack of time. I can tell you that having Bluetooth on seems to have a large negative impact on its lifespan, but that having an active ("always on") GPRS/EDGE connection seemed to have little impact by comparison. In general the battery life didn't strike me as brilliant or horrible. Your milage may vary.

Connectivity

Let me start off by saying that the 6230 has the best Bluetooth implementation that Nokia has yet to offer. That might not mean much to those of you that are familiar with some earlier attempts (better than horrible could still be bad, after all), but I can assure you that the 6230's Bluetooth system works well. I had very little trouble with it at all.

While not exactly perfect, I was able to use the 6230 as a GPRS/EDGE modem from my iPAQ 3870 (though not from a PalmOS Sony UX50), was able to browse the phone's file system using my desktop PC's Bluetooth system (no PC Suite needed), and I had no trouble at all using both Headset profile and Hands Free profile headsets. One of the few problems I encountered is the strange and constant volume level display that pops up when using a headset. This happens every time the headset reconnects actively so that the beeps and other sounds from the phone go to the headset. I thought this was a bug in my 6820. Obviously that is not the case. The 6230 was also unable to properly handle a "Send All Contacts" from a PalmOS device or a Sony Ericsson phone, which is a shame. But I was able to send individual files/photos/MP3s to and from any number of devices without a hitch.

The 6230 supports the following profiles: Headset, Hands Free, DUN, OBEX Push, OBEX Transfer, Serial, and PC Suite (Nokia proprietary). Missing is a Synchronization profile, such as that supported by the newer Sony Ericsson devices. You will need to use PC Suite to sync the 6230, it seems. One other limitation is that you can only have one connection active at a time. This means that if your headset is connected (even if you are not actively talking or listening through it), then you are unable to connect to the 6230 with any other device. This is not all that uncommon, and I am not picking on the 6230 here. Just pointing it out. But as I said, this is Nokia's best effort yet with regards to Bluetooth.

Elsewhere on the connectivity front we have the 6230's Infrared and GPRS systems. The IR system worked as expected, nothing to talk about there. GPRS worked fine once configured, but configuration for the various applications (browser, email, etc) really needs to be better organized. I've configured many a Nokia phone, and I swear it just keeps getting worse with each minor revision of firmware. The 6230 also supports higher speed EDGE data, so you can get an even faster connection if your network supports EDGE.

But as I said, when it was properly configured, it worked well. I was especially impressed by the xHTML/WAP v2.0 browser and Nokia's own WAP site. It truly looked like the kind of thing that iMode in Japan has been known for. I've included a few screen shots later in the story so you can see for yourself.

Messaging

Nothing too exciting in this section for people already familiar with any fairly recent MMS capable Nokia handset. But for those of you potential Nokia converts out there, I'll fill you in on the details.

The current Nokia MMS editor is a far cry better than the one that we saw in the early Nokia MMS handsets. The new editor allows for multiple slides in a MMS message, and each slide can have a picture or video, and potentially sound and text, too. There is even an assortment of pre-defined smilies, for those of you that like that kind of thing. The current version of the MMS editor also allows you to adjust the timing of each slide, so that you can control the flow of the presentation.

The SMS system is pretty much just like the SMS in every other Nokia Series 40 phone that has been made in the past two years. It is fast and effective. There is support for distribution lists and SMS profiles (for those of you using 3rd party SMS servers). The message delete system is also pretty flexible. Nokia includes support for Email over SMS, but who could possibly be bothered with that when you have a real email client available?

Speaking of which, the version of the Email client included with the 6230 is a natural evolution of the Java based app I first used in the 6800. But without the bugs. The app works pretty well, in general, but is still missing some features that I consider needed. While you can use SMTP authorization and secure login on the sending mail side of things, there is not much you can do with a pop server other than tell it how many messages to download. There is no option for downloading only headers, or only the first 3k of each message, or something like that. That greatly reduces the potential usefulness of the email client.

I had some great difficulty getting the email client to work in the first place due to what I consider to be a configuration nightmare. I had expected that the email program would make use of the GPRS connection defined in the phone's general Settings section, under Connectivity. I knew that I had that set correctly, because I was able to use the 6230 as a GPRS modem from my iPAQ. But the email app would always tell me "Subscribe to GPRS first." Which had, of course, nothing to do with the real problem. The problem is that the GPRS settings for sending and receiving mail in the email client need to be setup separately in the email settings. The program ignores the phone's settings. To get to the right spot to input the GPRS APN for your network, from the main menu go to: Messages, Settings, Email Settings, Edit Active Email, Other Settings, SMTP or POP Connection, Bearer Settings. Talk about being hidden deeply! Anyway, that was the key to getting the email app to work. Everything was ok from that point on.

Almost as a side-note, the T9 system in the 6230 is just like that in every other Nokia. Fast and well implemented. Still the standard by which others are measured.

Applications

The 6230 comes with a fairly extensive set of pre-isntalled applications. The Calendar application is just like that in most recent Series 40 devices. It is easy to use, and pretty flexible. There are lots of appointment types that you can use, a week-view mode, and a Delete All Notes option that testers like me really appreciate.

The To-do List app is not so good. The editor is a bit strange. For example, it is a bit counterintuitive when you create a new note and want to set a due date on it. You basically have to change the due date after you have created the note. It is a bit difficult to explain, but when you see it, you'll know what I mean. In general I just didn't find the app very flexible or useful.

Other applications that are included are: Remote Sync (SyncML), Notes, Wallet, Converter II, World Clock II, Calculator, Countdown Timer, Stopwatch, and Translator. The Translator app is something new to me. It allows you to enter a word and get a one word translation in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. The dictionary is by no means extensive, but it could certainly help out in a pinch.

The included PC Suite software will sync the calendar, to-do list, and notes in addition to the contact system previously mentioned. I did not have the opportunity to test out the SyncML support personally.

The last apps of note are the games. 3 were included in my test 6230. Those were Beach Rally 2, Golf, an Chess Puzzle. Beach Rally is a decent game, but not nearly as good as the game it appears to be modeled after: V-Rally. Golf looked interesting, but seemed to be a bit too complicated to be fun. Chess Puzzle is a joke for most people and probably should be deleted as soon as you get the 6230 in your hands. Luckily, it can be deleted.

One thing I noticed was that the Java apps loaded quite quickly on the 6230. Far faster than on other Java devices I have used, even the recent 6820 I have that has similar specs to the 6230. The load time was quite noticeable in its absence. That's a great change, because the Java apps are much more useful if you can get to them very quickly.

The Verdict

So, as you can see, the 6230 has a lot going for it. A radio, MP3 player, MMC card slot, camera with video capabilities, a great Bluetooth system, and a small form factor. That's a lot to like. But there is a big downside, in my opinion. The keypad is really bad. I'd go so far as to say awful. While I was not impressed by the 6230's display, it is really the keypad that makes me dislike the phone. The 6230's looks aren't that great, but looks are not all that important when compared to the awesome functionality this phone possesses. But the primary input method, the keypad, is all that important.

I am giving the 6230 a conditional "Highly Recommended" rating. If you pick up a 6230 in a store and find that the keypad suits you, then consider this rating to be "Highly Recommended". If, like me, you dislike the keypad and d-pad, then consider this a "Recommended" rating.

If you are looking for something else with similar capabilities, consider the Motorola V600, the Sharp GX-32, or the Sony Ericsson T630. While the Sharp is the only one of these three with a memory card slot and MP3 player, the other two have Bluetooth systems equally as good as the 6230.

Sumber : MOBILEBURN by Michael Oryl (editor) on Wednesday April 21, 2004.

SILAHKAN KIRIM TANGGAPAN/ PENDAPAT ANDA MENGENAI PRODUK INI