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Technophilia or extensive enthusiasm for new technology
is slowly but steadily infecting the youth. In rare
cases, even middle-aged men have shown vulnerability to
this generation Y syndrome. Typical symptoms include
playing the latest computer games (or waiting with bated
breath for Doom 3), amassing extensive knowledge from
technical websites, getting easily excited on seeing ads
for new gizmos, , or having an urge to acquire that
latest gadget in your favorite shopping mall - whether
you can afford it or not.
If you show or have shown any of these symptoms, you
are suffering from chronic technophilia. Fear not, I
have just the right cure for you. Read on...
Chronic technophilia! What else would I call this?
This time it struck me, and made me buy the perfect
phone - the Nokia 6230. This phone is also the costliest
I have ever purchased - standing numero uno at INR
18,500 (about USD 415). Adding to my ever-expanding list
of gadgets, which includes a digital camera, two camera
phones, a mini PDA phone, and a portable flash
memory-based mp3 player, this phone becomes the 18th I
have used.
 So
what's so good about this phone? Let me start with the
physical features. At first glance, this phone resembles
the massively popular 6610 in terms of size and weight.
The phone form factor is candy bar type, and weighs
around 90g. The curves in this phone are mostly squarish,
bringing out it's corporate-friendly personality. The
VGA camera is located on the back with the oh-so-nokia
strip extending to the side of the phone. The phone
loudspeaker and infrared port are stylishly located on
the right side of the phone. The power button is located
on the top and neatly designed to make it look perfect.
As in other models, the volume keys are located on the
left side for easy access during calls. The keypad
design, again, is mostly squarish, with wide buttons in
the mid row for large fingers. The keypad also features
a five-way scroll for quick navigation. This phone
belongs to the 6-series phones from Nokia (6230,
duh?!?), which are known for their business-oriented
features.
Getting to the interface, regular Nokia users will
fail to unlock this phone the first time. This phone
will not unlock with the left soft key and star (*)
combination. Instead, you have to push the five-way
scroll inside and then star (*) to unlock this beauty.
It may take a while before you get used to pushing the
scroll key to select. Apart from the standard Nokia
features, which include address book, messaging, call
register, settings, gallery, organizer, applications,
and services, this phone also contains a menu for media.
This menu contains the camera, media player for playing
streaming video and music, music player for playing .mp3
and .aac files, radio, voice recorder, and media
equaliser. The separate profiles menu has been done away
and has been included inside settings. Games are now
included inside the applications menu. The right soft
key is 'Go to' in standby mode, and provides access to
mostly frequently used functions such as create mms,
bluetooth options, inbox, gallery, services and so on.
The left soft key continues to activate the phonebook.
The interface is extremely fast and the phone response
to key press is simply outstanding. The graphics for the
menus have also been slightly changed from the 6610 or
6800.
Going deeper inside, the phone is based on the series
40 platform. The screen resolution is 128x128 with a
refreshing support for 65,536 colors. The display screen
is made of active TFT, unlike my T610, allowing easy
visibility in sunlight. The phone contains 8.8MB (wonder
how Nokia comes at this odd figures, why not 9MB!) of
internal memory and comes bundled with a 32MB MMC card
for additional data storage. The camera in the phone is
a VGA CMOS sensor, which manages to capture images at a
resolution of 640x480. The camera also doubles up as a
video recorder with no 9 second limitation. You can
capture videos of upto four minutes, which makes this
phone stand apart from earlier videophone models.
Another incredible change in this phone is the
quality of the loudspeaker very unlike the 6600 where
mp3s sound like AM radio! Nokia has finally realized the
importance of a good-quality loud speaker and has come
quiet close to that of Sony Ericsson. The inbuilt mp3
player is easy to use and supports a 5-band equalizer.
Presets such as rock, pop, and jazz are inbuilt, but you
can also create your own presets. Mp3 files can be set
as ring tones, message alerts, or alarm ringers. So this
means, you can wake up to your favorite song without
bothering to leave your computer on.
Connectivity for this phone is accomplished using
Bluetooth, Infrared, and GPRS. Unlike the earlier camera
phones, bluetooth can be turned on and off at will.
Infrared connectivity is pretty much same, though
transferring mp3 files (more than 2MB in size) takes a
good five to ten minutes. GPRS along with EDGE provides
a superior surfing experience. Wallet allows you to shop
online directly from your phone, without having to
bother about the security of your credit card
information. The phone also contains an e-mail client
for downloading mails from pop3 or IMAP servers. This
means you can check your mail and reply to them on the
go. The mail client, unlike earlier models (read 6800)
is responsive and fast. There are also loads of clipart,
images, and animated gifs for use with MMS messages.
Other features found in the 8310, such as voice
dialing and voice commands, which were left off in most
color screen models, have been included in this one.
Radio quality is crystal clear, camera quality is beyond
average, and the network signal strength in this phone
lives up to the Nokia pride.
Summing up, this phone has everything a technophile
like me would ask for. With a 65k color screen, a good
camera, a video recorder, a media player, MMS and
surfing through GPRS, voice dialing, radio and a massive
memory of at least 40 MB expandable to more than 512 MB,
this phone is rightly touted as the 'perfect phone' and
vouched for by yours truly.
BY ANISH VENKATESWARAN
You may notice that Anish Venkateshwaran promised
a cure for your chronic technophilia, but does not
mention it at the end. Well, what happened was he had a
relapse, and promptly forgot everything about the cure.
Guess we will have to wait till he is cured! :EDITOR |
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