Nokia mobile telephones have a reputation for being the best on the market, but for a long time they didn’t produce a phone with all the features (tri-band, bluetooth and GPRS) that I required and so I had bought (Sony-)Ericsson phones. Recently I noticed that the Nokia 6230 does have all these features and given Nokia’s aforementioned reputation, I decided to go with the 6230i instead of another Sony-Ericsson.

So, after my first week with the phone, is Nokia’s reputation deserved? As usual when switching brands some things are better, some things are worse, and some things which are just different.

The Better Things

• I’m impressed with the features of the phone, although it’s probably unfair to compare to my old phone (a T610) which is over 18 months old at this point. From what I remember the latest Sony-Ericsson K700 has a similar feature set to the 6230i (camera, MP3 player, FM radio, speakerphone, etc) but they all work very well and be of high quality: for example the camera has an impressive 1.3 mega-pixels and stored MP3s can also be used as ring tones.
• Also in the vein of being “feature-rich”, the phone comes with a 32MB SD card, and headphones for listening to the FM radio/MP3 player which also double as a hands-free kit.
• Despite the keys being slightly different sizes, the keypad has a high quality feel—quite a contrast to the flimsy joystick on Sony-Ericssons which are notorious for ceasing to work properly.
• The various shortcut keys are considerably more customisable than on the T610, although the T610 did have a couple of extra shortcut buttons available.

The Different Things

• The 6230i has two hard-coded buttons for ring/answer and hang-up just below the two soft/multi-function buttons. This was was a bit odd at first, and makes some functions easier to access during a call, but since the multi-function buttons often seem to be blank, it seems to offer little advantage.
• The predictive text dictionary appears to be a little better than on my old T610, but the interface itself is less intuitive. The T610 popped up a list of possibly words which the user then scrolled through using the joystick; in contrast the Nokia requires the user to change word using the unintuitive * key and no list of words is displayed.
• The Nokia has a speed-dial function, which allows a particular number to be assigned to the keys 2-9. In contrast, pressing and holding a key on the T610 caused it to jump to the first entry beginning with that letter in the phone book; subsequent presses took the user to the other letters owned by that key. I thought it worked nicely for my fairly small phone book but others may find the Nokia system more suitable.
• Similarly, voice dial tags on the 6230i are associated with individual numbers instead of a person on the T610.
• Scrolling through an SMS on the Nokia is slightly confusing at first as the scroll bar is a little hard to make out at the side of the screen and each press of the down arrow goes down one page instead of one line.

The Worse Things

• Being able to choose an arbitrary MP3 as your ring tone is very cool, but it would be nice if there was at least one ordinary sounding ring tone available!
• More seriously, I think it’s slow. Or at least, all the “information” screens it pops up to tell me that, for example, I’ve just unlocked the keypad slow me down. Several people have pointed out that these can be cleared by pressing any key, but that’s still an extra key press, and since the screens aren’t around for that long, sometimes that can result in an inappropriate double key press that slows me down even further. I’m getting used to it, but I think it’s a poor user interface design.
• Confusingly, when an SMS is sent successfully, the “Success” screen is displayed for only the briefest of times, and then the user is returned to the message composition screen containing the full text of the message they just sent. If they missed seeing the “Success” screen, how do they know if the message really was sent or not?
• I think I am being a little picky here, but the 6230i’s screen just isn’t as sharp as the T610′s, and the default font is large and ugly. As a result, less text fits on the phone’s screen, and so for example fewer phone book entries can be seen on the screen at one time.
• Finally, and this will probably only effect a few people, but the communication features are not as good on the Nokia and importing my phone book was my far more difficult than it should have been.
  1. The Nokia cannot receive multiple phone book entries sent via bluetooth in one go—each one has to be sent individually and explicitly accepted.
  2. There is no support for address book and calendar synchronisation with a computer except via Nokia’s bundled Windows-only software. Both of my Sony-Ericssons have trivially synchronised with Macs and Linux.
  3. Sending one’s own phone book entry (“business card”) is an awkward processing, requiring the user to navigate to their entry, then choose an option from the menu. In contrast, sending one’s own number was one of the default shortcut functions on the T610.

Conclusions

Overall, the Nokia 6230i is a good phone, but it is by no means perfect, and it is not the streets ahead of my old Sony-Ericsson T610 that I was expecting. Some of my initial irritations were just a matter of getting used to a different user interface, but I would say that the 6230′s interface is perhaps one of its weakest areas, and given how everyone seems to love using Nokias, I find that surprising. Although it’s difficult to judge this early in ownership, I think the phone’s strongest area is probably the physical phone itself—it feels solid and well-built, especially when compared to the T610.