Nokia 3230

Having used a Sendo X that is starting to get a little elderly and with a contract up for renewal, I thought I’d try one of Nokia’s Series 60 offerings to see how it compares. With the 6680 being too expensive, the 7610 being too old and the 6630 being too damn ugly (whoa there, just get a matt black cover and it’ll look cooler than cool – Ed.), I thought I’d give the 3230 a whirl.

First Impressions

One of the main attractions of the 3230 is its small form factor, with a modern, refined design. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its fair share of faults. The first one that will strike you is that when entering either text or numbers one-handed, the phone feels “unbalanced”. This is down to the keypad layout. The screen, calling buttons and menu buttons all take up about 2/3 of the phone. The net result is that if you hold on to the bottom 1/3 of the phone to enter text, the phone does not stay steady in the hand. A shame, but the the size of the buttons does make things a little easier. Moving up the phone, the joystick is nestled between the menu and call buttons and is quite friendly to use. To the left you have the Series 60 menu button and the Push-to-talk one on the phone’s side. It is fairly high up, so accidental presses while using the number pad are unlikely.

The screen is of a good quality, but (being LCD) it is prone to the odd dead pixel (the phone I used had one towards the lower middle of the display). The backlight is also pretty bright as well, with four brightness levels to choose from (maximum being the default setting). My one major niggle with the build quality comes right at the top of the phone. If any pressure is applied to the area left of the power switch (which I’m sure is recessed further than necessary), there is a rather unpleasant creaking noise…
Spec-tacular?

The phone uses an ARM-based 123MHz processor combined with a reasonable 8MB of RAM (i.e. free execution memory). What is a massive let down is the amount of on-board storage. It may just be where I’ve transitioned from my Sendo X (with is 31MB of storage) but a maximum of 5MB out of the box is very, very restrictive – not even enough space to run Quickoffice on. For the majority of the time at least, your applications will have to be stored on a memory card, DV RS-MMC being the flavour used here (as on all other recent Nokia units – Ed.) Unsurprisingly, Nokia package a 32MB card with the handset, so you’re not totally stuck from the outset. The OS is Series 60 version 2, on Symbian OS 7.0, so there shouldn’t be any problems with the vast majority of apps out there. It should, in theory, be able to run the newest version of TomTom MOBILE, too.
The Series 60 Swiss Army Knife

Maybe the lack of storage memory is down to the number of built-in apps Nokia have crammed into the 3230. All of the old classics such as Messaging, Contacts and Notes are present, in addition to several brand new features:

• Push-To-Talk. A feature common to standard and smartphones alike, this feature allows you to have a brief conversation with someone in much the same way as a walkie-talkie. Oh, except that it uses your GPRS connection at a hellishly expensive rate and no current UK operators support it.

• Visual Radio. This is a combination of radio broadcast and web site. Basically, when you’re listening to a particular radio station, the phone calls up a GPRS connection and allows you to view track information, competitions, forums and anything else connected with that station. A novel idea, but again, one that is not currently supported in the UK at present. Visit http://www.visualradio.com for more detailed info.

• Presence. Yet another GPRS and operator dependant service, it will be instantly familiar to anyone who uses an instant messenger program such as Yahoo, AOL or MSN Messenger. The service acts as a more sophisticated version of the “The person you have called is switched off…” message that is played when you cannot get through to another mobile. However, you have to manually change it yourself or use an always on GPRS connection to get it to work properly.

• Go To. This application made me smile after moving from my Sendo. As every Series 60 fan knows, the Sendo uses a series of shortcuts on the standby screen to allow almost instant access to the apps you want. Go To is essentially Nokia’s take on this. It allows you to set up several shortcuts to particular apps and (sometimes) more detailed parts of applications (e.g. you could set Messaging as an application or you could set a shortcut directly to your Inbox). This could have been a good idea in theory but the fact that it’s hidden in the main menu with no way to set it up on the Standby screen makes it pretty pointless. Oh well.

• Positioning. Now this is a good idea. It allows people to track your phone when switched on and works in a similar fashion to Psiloc’s Mini-GPS app. Very handy if your phone gets stolen and invaluable for the parent concerned about their offspring’s whereabouts.

A poorly spelled sense of fun

The 3230 is billed as a multimedia phone, a claim which it lives up to, up to a point. Most of the multimedia apps are camera-centric, so it seems like a good place to start. The resolution is typical of most modern Series 60 phones – 1.3 Megapixels. There isn’t a flash built into this phone, so unless there’s plenty of light, you may find your photos coming out a little on the dim side. Still, in terms of detail, there is little to complain about – if you’re looking for a few quick snaps of tourist attractions, family photos and eBay piccies, then the camera should fit the bill admirably. Just don’t expect to capture the subtle play of sunlight on a butterfly’s wings. Movie wise, the quality is pretty poor, even on a high setting. Any rapid movement results in the image becoming very blocky but in fairness, I would say this is due to the current limits of miniature camera technology, rather than a fault with the phone.

Once you’ve finished taking your photo or shooting your movie clip (which for some immensely annoying reason, Nokia spell “muvee”), you can edit them by using the two multimedia editors which come with the phone – Photo Editor and Movie Editor. The good news is that if you remove them to free up some space, you can later on download both from the Nokia website. The capabilities of each are not bad – provided you’re not expecting Adobe PhotoShop in 300Kb, you can do a reasonable amount of cutting, cropping, editing and pasting.

The selection of games built into the 3230 is pretty good as well. You have your standard shooting game in the form of Warrior Quest, a rally game and Agent V. Agent V is particularly impressive, as it has you looking through the camera shooting imaginary objects around the room. A great way to pass the time but probably not a game you would want to play in public.

The biggest letdown however, comes from the MP3 player. Despite being labeled on the box as supporting stereo sound, **only the radio supports stereo playback – the MP3 player is dual mono only**. This, combined with the limited amount of space that initially comes with the handset, means the 3230 is a poor choice as an MP3 player.
Summary

There are a lot of things about the 3230 that really grate on my nerves. The lack of storage space, the sound quality of the MP3 player, the fact that Nokia don’t know how to spell “movie”. But for someone looking for a (Series 60) smartphone with a small form factor, cheap price tag and a host of GPRS features (once they finally get off the ground), you could do much worse than the 3230.

Having used a Sendo X that is starting to get a little elderly and with a contract up for renewal, I thought I’d try one of Nokia’s Series 60 offerings to see how it compares. With the 6680 being too expensive, the 7610 being too old and the 6630 being too damn ugly (whoa there, just get a matt black cover and it’ll look cooler than cool – Ed.), I thought I’d give the 3230 a whirl.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_3230.php

Nokia 7710

Nokia market the 7710 as a ‘Widescreen smartphone’, which gives you a little hint as to what to expect, but ‘Symbian PDA’ is perhaps more accurate. The use of a stylus to input text has been seen before, on the Sony Ericsson P900 (and other UIQ devices), but that also had a proper phone-like one-handed mode and the overall size and form factor was very much phone like. The 7710 is, well, different. If you know a little about the general PDA world, it’s like using a Palm Tungsten T3 or T5 in ‘landscape’ mode. The stylus is used for just about everything, from tapping on-screen buttons, to entering text gestures, to playing hunt and peck on an on-screen keyboard. The use of a stylus means, of course, that operating the 7710 is almost exclusively a two-handed affair, and this aspect is absolutely crucial in determining if the device is for you or not. Where Series 60 smartphones are designed to be predominantly used one-handed, often on the move, you have to consciously stop, stand still and concentrate to use the 7710.

I have to confess that I came to this review expecting to really, really dislike the 7710, but I gradually found more and more features which worked well and which I could see myself using in real life. It hasn’t toppled any of my current favourite mobile devices from my Grid, but it gave them a pretty good run for their money. Read on…

Measuring a quite reasonable (for the screen resolution of 640 by 320 pixels) 128 x 69.5 x 19 mm, but weighing a fairly hefty 190 grams, the 7710 follows the usual Nokia scheme of having replaceable front and back covers, sandwiching a black device frame. There are Call/End call buttons on top, plus a Psion-like Voice recorder button. As long-time readers may spot, this is the first of several similarities to the Psion Series 5 range and, along with the Nokia 9500, the 7710 forms a pretty logical current equivalent to a Psion palmtop (especially when in conjunction with the compatible Nokia Wireless Keyboard).

The front panel buttons have taken some stick from other reviewers and their layout certainly looks a little higglety-pigglety, but in Nokia’s defense, after several days of using the 7710, all the buttons and their functions came easily to hand and each compliments the touch sensitive screen well. From bottom left, going clockwise, the buttons are for the Desk (Applications), Menu, the navigator (with central Enter keypress), Zoom (different applications support this to diferent extents, but there are usually two or three zoom levels to cycle round), a button to cycle between different views within a program (e.g. List/Card/Notes) and finally an Escape button, for backing out of whatever menu or dialog you’re currently in.

This system of mixed keypress and stylus input, together with the Windows XP-like curved dialogs, is generally known as Series 90, although if the 7710 proves to be the only device of its type, the interface designation is going to be fairly irrelevant. The information coming out of Nokia suggests that Series 90 is going to be (somehow) subsumed into Series 60, although I’ll have to see this to believe it. In terms of functionality, you can think of the 7710 as a Nokia 9500 with a larger, touch sensitive screen and FM radio. Certainly the main applications (Calendar, Contacts, Messaging, Documents, Sheet, and so on) bear an obvious common heritage and, behind the scenes, most of the actual Symbian Operating System is identical. You can even run a number of Communicator applications as-is, proving their similarity.
As with the Nokia 9500, Office compatibility is a mixed bag. You can certainly open up most Office files that get emailed to you (after a short wait each time while the files are ‘converted’ (to native Symbian Word/Sheet format), and the 7710 will do a decent job of showing you the core content. It will even let you edit away happily, but watch out when returning these files to the desktop or to the original sender as not every document attribute and feature is preserved. As with other such handheld systems, it’s best to resave edited versions under a different name, just in case.
As with the 9500, Nokia haven’t skimped on storage memory, with 90MB of internal flash memory for the user to fill, although Series 90 seems to take up a lot more of the 32MB of RAM, leaving only about 10MB free for running programs after the OS has been loaded. This is not really enough and ‘Memory too low’ messages pop up several times a day. Although there’s no way to close most applications down individually, a 5 second press on the ‘Escape’ button kicks the OS into closing everything down, to reclaim as much RAM as possible, after which programs work again but you’ve got to open them from scratch.

Although the OS is properly multitasking, as usual, there’s no mechanism provided for looking at the applications currently running or switching to them, which is a huge shame. Instead, pressing and holding the Desk button brings up shortcuts to the most recently launched four applications, which I suppose is better than nothing. Application launch times are similar to those on the 9500, around 2 or 3 seconds, though once running, subsequent taps on an icon see the application returned to the foreground within a second.

And so to the unique features of the 7710. The screen is large and clear and a pleasure to view. The stylus is housed in a silo on the bottom left of the device, cleverly camoflaged, and this positioning works well in practice. Having to get it out to enter text was never something I really got used to, although once out, entry of text is just as fast as on a Palm or Pocket PC. Once nice touch is that within Control panel you can ‘train’ the 7710 to recognise extra gestures that are unique to you, so if there’s a favourite Graffiti shortcut from an old Palm, the 7710 will happily read it after being shown an example.

Nokia make a lot of the integrated ‘Visual Radio’, a system for tying in web content (accessed over GPRS) to a traditional FM signal. Example content might be adverts, purchase links for the tracks being played and information screens. The theory’s fine, but in practice the system is still unavailable across most of the world. In Reading, in the centre of the UK, I wasn’t able to pick up a single station that had the appropriate visual tags. Still it’s always nice to have a stereo radio on board a smartphone, so it would be churlish to complain too much.

Like most recent Nokia smartphones, multimedia is a fairly strong suit on the 7710, with support for MP3 and AAC-encoded music, plus playback of most 3GP formatted video files. If you want full-screen video at any decent quality though, you’re going to have to look to third party software. The built-in RealPlayer is as weak as on other Symbian platforms and you just know that the hardware’s capable of a lot more.

Other things I found worthy of note (good and bad):

• The way applications are assigned to Desk groups is unintuitive. Neither the ‘Move’ nor ‘Add to group’ menu functions did the job. Instead, you have to go into the destination group and ‘Edit’ its properties, adding application shortcuts from a list.

• the built-in File manager won’t display files in any other folder than ‘My files’ on the internal disk or non-System folders on the MMC. While this is acceptable for new users, power users will be lobbying for a decent third party alternative from day one of ownership.

• Sketch is back! Or at least a function with the same name as the old Psion favourite. Within the main Images application is a painting/editing facility, with the capability of creating new, original sketches if needed. It’s fairly basic, with just pens, lines, basic shapes and text, but it’s a logical next step given that there’s a stylus and touch-screen. You can even embed your images in Word (Documents) files, just as on the old Psion.

• the megapixel camera is only barely that. In fact, if you do the maths, 1152 x 864 pixels isn’t actually a megapixel camera at all 😎

• the built-in web browser is Opera at heart, just as on the 9500. This does a pretty good job on the whole, although it’s limited in power by the slowish (150MHz) processor in the 7710.
• Messaging shines by providing a proper ‘Automated send/retrieve’ system for either full messages or just headers. Alas, for those conscious of GPRS costs, it also scores an own goal by not providing any means of showing you how large each message is going to be before retrieval. This could get expensive.
• among the extra bits and pieces on the 7710 is an excellent global Find utility. This does such a good job of searching files and contents for specific text strings that I hope we see this ported around the Symbian world.
• the 7710 is fully compatible with the latest and greatest PC Suite, so it’s quite practical to have several Symbian devices connected to your PC at the same time.

Other specifications you might be interested in: it’s a triband phone, supporting 900/1800/1900 MHz. There’s Bluetooth, but no infrared or Wi-Fi (unforgiveable, considering the price point and target market). The battery is 1300 mAh Li-Polymer and should last a fair while. I gave it a full charge at the start of my review and it lasted two or three days of inveterate fiddling before needing a top-up.

The only real downside to the Nokia 7710, other than the fact that it needs two hands to operate, is that it’s just all a bit sluggish. True, the 9500 is no speedster, but there the occasional wait is forgiveable because there’s the keyboard to speed your work once the relevant dialog or window has opened. In the 7710, windows (for example, in Messaging) take even longer to open but there’s no keyboard to make amends once you get there. Used intelligently, the 7710 will be quite fast enough for most people. It’s just a shame that the speed lets it down now and then. The worst example is possibly the application installer. Attempting to install the (admittedly 20MB) demo version of TimeOut Guide from the Nokia 7710 web site resulted in the installer ‘hanging’ for over 90 seconds. With no ‘Busy’ or ‘Please wait’ message up, and of course no Microsoft hourglass, I’ll bet that the average user would pull the battery out after a minute of doing nothing.

The 7710 certainly doesn’t look like any phone you’ve ever seen and this will probably hit sales. Those in the know will think of it as a Nokia-branded connected PDA and enjoy it for what it is, but the rest of the world may just scratch their heads. More fool them.

The Nokia 7710 comes with a black plastic stand, USB sync cable, good quality stereo headphones, a 128 MB MMC card, battery, CD with PC Suite (ignore this and get the latest off the Web), a printed user manual and a pretty decent leather carrying case (with all the right cutouts).

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_7710.php

Nokia 6630

If you’ve been watching AllAboutSymbian over the last month, you’ll have spotted my full review of the Nokia 6680, the very latest Series 60 smartphone that’s actually available (the N Series being a few months away, in the real world). So what on earth am I doing here reviewing the 6630, a device that was announced last year (2004) and which has been on the streets for six months?
Reason 1 is (fairly obviously) that we hadn’t reviewed it at the time (ahem). So consider this a long-term review. Reason 2 is that I wanted to put the device into some kind of perspective, in terms of where it fits in on the high street, within the Symbian and Nokia scenes and from the viewpoint of someone (like me) trying to use it as my only mobile computer.

In fact, a little tardiness on the review front makes talking about value for money really, really easy. If you’re looking for a cutting-edge Symbian smartphone and don’t want to dig too deep into your pocket, the Nokia 6630 is easily the one to go for. All around the High Street, stores are offering the 6630 for free on quite modest SIM contracts, or you can pick one up on eBay, second-hand, for not much more than £100. When you consider that you’re effectively getting a Symbian-powered mobile computer, plus (up to) 3G telephony/data, a stereo music player and a Megapixel camera, all for not an awful lot, it’s hard to resist.

For anyone who hasn’t been following the story of Series 60 closely, here’s a potted history. The first generation (Series 60 v1.2) of devices were soundly panned by people such as myself: the PIM applications were laughable, the interface klunky, battery life was poor, there was no stereo output so you couldn’t use them as music players, third party software was largely of the gimmicky variety, you had to reboot the device just to swap memory cards and the camera quality was generally atrocious. The Siemens SX-1, the Sendo X and the Nokia N-Gage bucked this trend to a degree, but each of these still had their weak points.

With the Symbian OS baseline constantly improving and with Series 60 v2 bringing interface and PIM application improvements by the score, we saw the Nokia 6600 and 7610, much better devices but still very limited in several areas. The Nokia 6630 was the first device of the ‘next generation’ of devices, with hardware improvements to match those in software. Looking back at the hit-list from those initial Series 60 smartphones, the 6630 has significantly improved PIM apps (intelligent display of appointments in the Day view, entry popups in Month view, etc.), a far more attractive and useful interface (themes, wrap around menus, etc.), great battery life, full stereo headset output, hot-swappable memory cards and a good Megapixel camera. Plus the third party software scene has matured and most applications you can think of have now been done. As mentioned in the Nokia 6680 review, this all adds up to a smartphone that offers genuine convergence and genuine usefulness.

So to the device itself. The Nokia 6630 is smaller than its spiritual predecessor, the 3650, and thankfully the circular keypad is now a traditional grid, with the Series 60 ‘extra’ keys now the ones that help fill up the ‘bulge’. The screen’s very good in all lighting conditions and a light sensor at the top of the device switches on the keypad backlight if needed. The feel of the keys and navigator is good, although not quite up to the exemplary level of the 6680’s. There’s a (by now traditional) Pop-port connector on the bottom, for plugging in the supplied stereo headset or for mounting on the optional video calling stand. This last requirement will be a real pain for anyone buying the 6630 for outright 3G use, as you can’t do two-way video calling using just the device as there’s only the one camera and it’s on the wrong side. If you need video calling, look at the 6680 instead.

There’s a memory card slot on the right, protected by a swing-out flap. The card format is (take a deep breath) DV RS-MMC, which sounds more awkward than it is. Essentially, it’s a smaller version of the standard MMC (so that the phone itself can stay small) and it operates at only 1.8V on the device (and 3.3V in, say, a card reader, hence DV – ‘Dual Voltage), so that battery life can be significantly extended. I know it’s a pain having to buy yet another type of memory card, but the decision to use DV RS-MMC does make sense. One caveat is that card capacity is currently limited to 512MB, but this is still plenty for all but the most outrageous uses. I’m pretty much at the power user end of the scale and, on my 512MB card, I currently have the whole of Great Britain/TomTom MOBILE 5, about a dozen CDs of music (in Ogg Vorbis format, which is twice as efficient as MP3), around ten applications, five games and a selection of reference works, including the Bible and Trivopaedia.

Like almost all recent Nokia handsets, you get the fun of replacing the front and back ‘Xpress-on’ skins whenever you fancy a change. Although this is sometimes seen as a bit of a gimmick, it’s very useful for replacing the default silver skin (which I find garish and flashy) with something understated like the black rubber skin (no fetishes, please, I’m British, but I do find that the dull black finish makes the smartphone look and feel far more professional). Also, and more importantly, it means that if the cover starts to get scratched or marked, it’s trivial to simply put a brand new skin on, for only a few pounds. Try doing that with an XDA or Treo….

The Megapixel camera (1280 by 960 pixels) isn’t bad at all and I’ve had very good printed results from its images. Certainly it’s a revelation when compared to the previous generation of VGA cameras. As with all smartphone cameras, it’s lousy when the light levels are low, but used in daylight you’ll be very happy with its output. When coupled with the latest PC Suite 6.6 (this also works with most other current Nokia smartphones, including the 9500 and 9300), it’s easy to snap away and rely on PC Suite to sync across all your pictures and file them by date on your hard disk. As a bonus, PC Suite also presents them as a slideshow within Nokia’s Multimedia Player under Windows.

As mentioned above, Series 60 itself has come a long way, with a quick and intuitive interface throughout. Of the PIM apps, Contacts is almost there, with only a question mark over formatting of entry notes. Calendar is much improved, though without any support for entry notes whatsoever (notes on Outlook Calendar entries simply aren’t displayed). Disappointingly, To-do is still just a single list – Nokia need to revisit this application soon. Notes syncs happily to Outlook’s notes and provides a quick and easy way to sync text content between smartphone and desktop, in either direction. So useful text pasted in from Windows gets onto the smartphone and new text typed on the smartphone gets back to Windows, and so on.

Messaging is virtually unchanged from earlier incarnations, but then it does the job. A Symbian smartphone can probably never be your only email monitor, which is why there’s no attempt to delete emails from the IMAP4 or POP3 server. It’s simply a way of seeing what’s waiting, of grabbing anything important and responding if necessary. And this the 6630 allows with relative aplomb. The only fly in the ointment is that there’s no readout of message size when displaying email headers. Instead, you have to go burrowing into the menu for ‘Message details’ every single time. Please fix this, Nokia.

Extra applications shipped in the box include the read-only version of Quickoffice and, in line with the marketing of the 6630, a fun (but slow) ‘Image manager’, a (even slower) ‘Photo editor’ and a ‘Video editor’. None of these applications are heavyweight, but they’re still handy to have for novices. Miscellaneous utilities, of varying worth, include an Instant Messaging client, a units converter, a secure database (this doesn’t sync to anything, though) and a ‘File manager’ for beginners that hides all the scary parts of the file system and just shows the bits that Nokia wants you to know about 😎 A generic Bluetooth keyboard driver is supplied and worked well with my Think Outside keyboard.If you’ve been watching AllAboutSymbian over the last month, you’ll have spotted my full review of the Nokia 6680, the very latest Series 60 smartphone that’s actually available (the N Series being a few months away, in the real world). So what on earth am I doing here reviewing the 6630, a device that was announced last year (2004) and which has been on the streets for six months?If you’ve been watching AllAboutSymbian over the last month, you’ll have spotted my full review of the Nokia 6680, the very latest Series 60 smartphone that’s actually available (the N Series being a few months away, in the real world). So what on earth am I doing here reviewing the 6630, a device that was announced last year (2004) and which has been on the streets for six months?
As mentioned in the 6680 review, I’ve long railed against Nokia for excluding the possibility that people might want to experience true convergence and listen to their music on their smartphone, with most previous Nokia smartphones only having mono audio output. With the 6630 and 6680 (and siblings and successors), there’s full stereo output via the Pop-port connector and quality over the supplied headset was very good. Nokia intend you to listen to your music in MP3 format using RealPlayer, but canny users will want to encode their favourite CDs in Ogg Vorbis format and use the freeware OggPlay instead. This has far superior tag sorting, is skinnable, is more efficient and produces louder output, quite apart from being able to cram twice as much music on your card. Ok, so your Nokia smartphone many not be an iPod killer, but it can comes damn close for casual listening purposes.

Nokia has released a version of its ‘Settings wizard’ for each recent smartphone, for easy setup of 3G and GPRS Internet settings. It claims to also put in all the right POP3 or IMAP4 mailbox details as well, but there are only details for a dozen or so ISPs and mine (UK Online) wasn’t listed.

As with the 6680, general connectivity is almost perfect, with exemplary Bluetooth performance, good PC Suite 6.6 integration with your PC data, and support for every telephony standard across the world, from the various GSM bands to full 3G, although the usual caveats about being beholden to the mobile data policy of your 3G network provider apply here. The only omission is infrared, for which I still have a soft spot. Every time you come across someone with an older infrared-only PDA you’ll wish the 6630 had the same.

I mentioned the 6630’s unique position in the market right at the start of this long term review. Money, as has often been observed, makes the world go around and we’re all looking for a bargain. The Nokia 6630, whether bought cannily on a contract or snapped up in the final minutes of an auction on eBay, could be just the bargain you need. It has all the multi-tasking Symbian OS power you’ve been looking for, it’s bang up to date and right now it needn’t cost the earth.

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_6630.php