Nokia 6230i

Discontinued
1st March 2005

As the name suggests, the Nokia 6230i is an upgrade of the Nokia 6230 with some significant improvements over the previous model. At first glance, the 6230i looks pretty similar to the 6230, with understated and businesslike good looks.

But scratch the surface and you'll see the real differences - for starters, the Nokia 6230i has a 208x208 pixel TFT display in 65,000 colours, the first time we've seen this, which brings a much higher pixel density to a screen the same size as the 6230. There's also a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back of the 6230i, which at last makes it a useful digital camera.

The screen and camera were two weak points with the old handset, and the stronger points were elsewhere, and these still exist in the newer handset. The 6230i has Bluetooth, expandable memory on MMC cards up to 512Mb, stereo FM radio, XHTML Web Browser, email client, integrated handsfree speakerphone, MP3/AAC/M4A media playback and GPRS, EDGE and HSCSD data. In addition, there's now "visual radio" (a GPRS based music service) and PTT (push-to-talk). Talktime is around 5 hours with up to 12 days standby.

As you'd expect, the Nokia 6230i synchronises with a PC in the usual way via Bluetooth, USB or infra-red, supports Java and polyphonic ringtones and MMS plus an array of other useful features.

This is a good phone that will appeal to business and personal users alike. The 208x208 pixel screen is a particularly clever idea and one that we'll no doubt be seeing in other devices soon, and the 1.3 megapixel camera on the 6230i is likely to be the same high-quality device that Nokia use on their other phones. Combined with all the other features, the 6230i is a very powerful handset which probably really deserved a new model number rather than an "i" suffix, but we're nitpicking a little here.

The Nokia 6230i should be available in the second quarter of 2005 for an unsubsidised price of around €350/£240/$430. We strongly suspect that this handset will sell in truly massive numbers when it hits the retail channel.

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