Review of the Nokia 6230

Engadget pal Nick Bicanic has been raving to us about his new Nokia 6230 cellphone, so we asked him, Why not do a quick review of it for us? Luckily for us, he obliged:

So I've been following the Nokia 6230 for a while now, and when the local dodgy Hong Kong grey market import shop (I'm in Vancouver, Canada) finally got one in, I bought it immediately. For the record the 6230 is not "officially" available in North America yet — the market here is just way behind the rest of the world — but since it's a tri-band GSM phone it works perfectly well here.

Here are my initial thoughts on some aspects of the phone after a few hours of playing with it:

First things first. As a phone it's small and cool and has a very bright screen. The only colour they had was silver, though the Nokia site shows one with an iPod-like white finish which looks VERY nice. The phone includes a VGA camera which takes 640x480 JPEGs and shoots 15 frames per second, 128x96 resolution, 3gp video clips, and has an MMC memory card slot (the phone actually comes with a 32MB card). Creating video clips using the phone is fairly easy (it was one of the first thing I tried to do), and the phone can also play back AAC and MP3 audio files
— as well as any video clips you've recorded.

The 6230's built-in loudspeaker is great, and the MMC card slot is handy for getting video clips off of the phone or loading up with music to listen to, though one headache is that the phone has to be turned off to remove the card since the slot is actually underneath the battery.

I wasn't able to test out the phone's built-in Bluetooth, or try its EDGE or GPRS data connections, but I
did spend some time doing the old phone switchover (backup everything from one phone onto the computer then transfer it back onto the new phone – and before someone says "use the SIM card, stupid" – yeah, you can't really do that if you run multiple SIMs). Interestingly enough (ok, well interestingly enough for me) this procedure always involves initial IR setup for the new phone, but in this department the new PC software suite available from Nokia (version 6.1)
finally solves the irritating bugs that plagued the earlier versions. Even so it took about 20 minutes to update my contacts/datebook correctly (and it even grabbed my images) — why manufacturers can't figure out a surefire way to easily transfer all this data between phones is beyond me. So far I'm happy, but I'd like the next one to have a metal shell and improved resolution for recording video clips.