Jørgen Sundgot takes on Nokia's 3230 low-end smartphone, finding its EDGE support and integrated FM radio to be among its most appealing qualities.
Review summary of the Nokia 3230:
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Full Nokia 3230 Review:
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As of the last two-three years or so, Nokia hasn't been one to favour major handset upgrades. Rather, the company has relied on shoveling out models with small, incremental tweaks and upgrades by the dozens (literally) - and although its smartphone category for a little while seemed to have escaped this frenzy, 2005 has shown the opposite to be true. Borne out of this approach is the 3230, Nokia's first non-3G smartphone to include support for EDGE, and also the maker's first candybar smartphone to include an FM radio.
10 Print Hello World, 20 Goto 10
Following a tried and true recipe, Nokia's 3230 comes across as a modestly sized and rather attractive smartphone at 110 g and 109 x 49 x 19 mm. Courtesy of a clever design trick or two, its delightfully bright and crisp 65K colour screen with adjustable brightness comes across as larger than it really is, yet is unable to draw our attention away from a couple of faux pas in the ergonomics department.
Despite excellent tactile feedback, the numerical keypad has been placed too far down on the front of the phone, leading to users having to choose between having the 3230 bobbing madly up and down with every press or choose a higher grip only to have their thumbs uncomfortably strained. Similarly poor, the flush navigational array just below the screen has uncomfortably short and heavy key travel, and combining small button sizes with placing the 'C' button right next to two other frequently used buttons isn't clever at all. As usual, however, Nokia has managed to stick a standout feature among several mediocrities; one of its best joysticks ever sits smack dab in the middle.
Stepping away from the front for a moment, we find a large yet somewhat heavy push-to-talk button on the left side, as well as a similarly challenged power button atop. Observant readers will by now have noticed that we haven't mentioned the RS-MMC card expansion slot, the reason for which is its location under the battery lid. Yes, Nokia should have known better by now, and no, they don't seem to be paying attention in class. Bad Nokia. Bad, bad Nokia.
What Nokia always does well, however, is cameras. Similar to many other recent smartphones from the Finnish maker, the 1.3 Megapixel camera delivers excellent quality as compared to similar offerings from other handset makers. There's even a small ridge to protect the plastic lens, and - believe it or not - it has been designed so that the phone doesn't rock back and forth when placed on a flat surface. What can we say, we're perfectionists.
It's what's inside that matters
Retreating to take a closer look at the connectivity capabilities of the 3230, we find a relatively comprehensive offering with tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz as well as GPRS and EDGE on the slate. Data transfer performance is excellent, as we've come to excpect from Nokia, as is signal reception and voice quality, with the loudspeaker also performing admirably.
For short-range connectivity, the 3230 offers up a good selection of Bluetooth profiles, as well as Nokia's proprietary Pop-Port for USB connectivity with PCs. Memory expansion, as has already been mentioned, is courtesy of an RS-MMC card slot hidden beneath the battery lid; a practice we've already made our opinion of strikingly clear. Still, we'll repeat it for your reading pleasure: for the love of God (and the sake of our collective sanity), get the damn thing out of there.
Two-way connectivity isn't the only kind of connectivity the 3230 has to offer, though. An integrated FM radio is coupled with Nokia's Visual Radio software to provide either a basic radio experience with good signal reception and adequate audio quality, or the same experience with interactivity added atop. Despite being an interesting concept, however, only one radio station on the entire face of the earth - based in Finland - currently offers the Visual Radio experience, so don't rush out to buy the 3230 based on this premise alone.
Fortunately, extensive radio listening doesn't appear to impact battery life as extensively as in previous models, but will still place a drain on the battery. We were able to squeeze between two and three days of average use out of the 3230, which is on par with the vast majority of other recent smartphones.
Good fun and then some
On the software side of things, the Nokia 3230 is rather similar to most recent smartphones from Nokia but differs on a few points. First and foremostly, it includes the same PIM software, utility set and broad feature and standard support as found in recent peers. This includes presence, positioning, chat and push-to-talk, as well as a handy settings wizard for automatically configuring network settings. Also, messaging support is as broad as ever with SMS, MMS and POP3/IMAP4/SMTP e-mail on the slate.
Imaging functionality is also comprehensively present, with the 3230 capable of shooting video clips up to one hour long combined with the ability to edit images and video on-device as well as upload to online services and print the latter kind via Bluetooth. What gives the 3230 away as a consumer-targeted smartphone, however, is the inclusion of four games of which two in particular are of high quality and provide quick thrills whilst waiting in line at the super.
Unfortunately, however, our usual complaint concerning the synchronization capabilities of Nokia smartphones is also very much present. Briefly summarized, a total lack of groupware support; no adaptation of IMAP4 protocol support (as found in the
Nokia 6680) to render the 3230 more Exchange friendly; and ghastly slow and limited support for PC synchronization make for an apalling experience. In the name of fairness, though, the 3230 isn't targeted at business users, to which the complete lack of Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat file format viewers bears witness.
Availability
The Nokia 3230 is at the time of press available throughout Europe, selling in the €320 EUR ($400 USD) range without a subscription.
Price and availability
The Nokia 3230 will start selling for TBA () in November 1999.
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