Nokia 6230i review: On the top, again

Marek Lutonský, 12 April 2005.

Immediately after the cable has been connected the following request appears on the display "Activate USB data transfer? ". If you give a positive answer, the computer finds the phone and installs it as a storage device. No installation is necessary if you repeatedly connect the phone to a computer for the hard drive appears straight away. The phone is unusable while in a process of transferring, but a sound alerts you of the missed calls and messages. I needed 70 seconds to cable transfer a 17.5 MB files from the computer to the phone's card. Hence the transferring speed is 15 MB per minute. What a pity that the USB cable is not a part of the original delivery package and has to be bought additionally.

According to Nokia's statements the phone has 32 MB built-in memory, but the user is allowed to use 27 MB. Anyway, when I counted up all possible items I did not get over 24 MB. The maximum size of the java midlet has been boosted from 128 KB to 512 KB. It is not possible to download and install a java game or application through the infrared port. You will have to do it either from the computer using PC Suite, or from WAP. I mean, you will manage to download the file into the phone, but it will not get started afterwards.

The phone has a gallery, which allows for browsing the multimedia files saved in the built-in memory or on the card. It is divided into several sections: Pictures, Video clips, and Music files, Themes, Graphics, Tones and Records. The gallery offers three views: a simple file list (5 items per page), a file list with details (3 items) or a matrix image (9 items without details).

The gallery's three views

Multimedia files, which are not protected by copyrights and whose transferring is not prohibited either, can be sent to a computer or other devices through Infrared port or Bluetooth. In a similar way, you can also send data to the phone.

The camera: not the mega we expect

The increase of the camera resolution to 1280×1024 pixels is practically the only innovation. The rest of the camera's functions have not been changed, so Nokia offers very few setup options, again. The quality of the image of any taken photo is very good, due to the fine display. However, when I viewed its pictures in the computer, the camera of the Nokia 6230i turned out to be just average.

Nokia 6230i is the first "common"mobile phone of the Finish manufacturer, which has a megapixel camera.

Nokia 6230i is a member of the Series 40 platform and is a successor of the old 6230 model. The megapixel camera is one of its main innovations. Unfortunately, there aren't any bigger improvements in the applications responsible for taking pictures. Nokia offers a standard mode with a smaller format for phonebook portraits, a night mode and a video option. You can choose out of three levels of picture quality, there is a shutter release, a two-step zoom, which just crops a part of the image. Among the functions, that's basically everything.

The photos are in a 1280×1024 pixels format, which is a bit uncommon (but native for most of the LCD displays). If you look at the photos on a computer monitor with typical CRT resolution like 1024×768, the photos will not fit on full screen due to the slightly different aspect ratio.

How to take pictures

Before you start taking pictures you need to just press the up-arrow from the main display (provided you have not set up a different function for this shortcut). Within two seconds the photo viewfinder will appear on the display. Thanks to the fine display, the images' quality is unusually high, unlike the redrawing speed, which is rather average.

To take a picture you just need to press the shutter. There is a sound switch on/off option is in the menu. When ready, photos appear on the display. The images are usually perfectly sharp and detailed - even after magnification.

Pictures can be sent in a multimedia message, using infrared port or Bluetooth, and of course, downloaded into a computer through a cable connection.

Camera quality: compared to Nokia 6630

Considering the quality of its pictures, Nokia 6230i is not among the best camera phones available on the market. It is true, that the higher resolution makes up for many disadvantages. Yet, if we compare this model's pictures with those taken with Nokia 6630, which was a regular winner according to the readers' opinion, they just seem to lack something. All taken pictures are a little bit grey-shaded, sometimes the color balance did not come out right, and sometimes noise appears, even in good light conditions. But go on and make your own judgments. The pictures are taken with full resolution and are therefore somewhat bigger than usual.

As usual, everything depends on the subjective opinion. I assume some of you might like the pictures taken with Nokia 6230i more, the reason might be that the ones by Nokia do not feature such a strong image contrast.

The pictures taken with Nokia 6230i are always displayed on the left. To make the comparison easy, we offer the same scenes shot with Nokia 6630 on the right. Since the original pictures were much too big, we reduced the format to 600 pixels in height.