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Push-to-talk - a real phone, reviewed, from Nokia

With all the fuss about push to talk outside America (will it really happen?) you may want to try it out. Coincidentally, the Nokia 6230i cameraphone, with EDGE and PTT capability, gets reviewed today by that most probing of reviewers, Jim Khang at Mobile Burn.

At the end of his meticulous review, I can't see many people getting enthusiastic about it, even though its predecessor, the 6230 has been very successful. .

The best he can find to say about it, is that "Our 6230i was from the Malaysian market and ran firmware version 03.25, 31-03-05, RM-72I have to admit, the 6230i is a good phone... the 6230i is what the 6230 should have been a year ago, and...for [those] who are looking for a capable business phone, the 6230i is worth a look and a phone we would recommend."

But the praise is faint. The new, brilliant display can be read in harsh sunlight and " the resolution has been upped to a whopping 208 x 208 pixels, a great improvement over the old 128 x 128 pixels." Yet... the display can't be dimmed, which makes it blinding at night." Not unique to the Nokia, of course, but a niggle.

Other niggles: the keypad: "The same unsteady keypad of old is back with no improvement. The keys still feel wobbly and are moved about too easily - especially the 5-key. As a result of this, some keypresses were not registered while typing SMS or playing games."

It has more user memory, and an MMC memory card; but the MMC card supplied has only 64 meg, and if you want to replace it, you have to switch the phone off and pull the battery out first. It's not going to be a favourite with MP3 addicts, then.

There's a new user interface: Khang found it inconsistent, with traps set to catch you out by pressing the wrong key. "For example, you might pull up a list of options with the left selection key. Scrolling down to the option that you want, you will likely feel tempted to press the left selection key again to select that option but it does nothing. You have to use the centre selection key on the d-pad to select that option. This gets worse when you want to delete a certain file. After selecting Delete (with centre selection key), the phone will ask if that's what you really want to do. At this point, selecting Yes is done by pressing on the left selection key. This inconsistency was a nuisance during the entire week that I was using the 6230i."

Battery life was only "fair" - especially if you used Bluetooth. But as a phone, it worked well, with good call quality and few dropped calls - which, for this class of phone, really is the bottom line.

So it's probably not fair to focus too much on Khang's disappointment with the 1.3 megapixel camera, which couldn't focus, gave odd colours, or the email application, which he found unnecessarily complex to set up, or the predictive text, which, he said, had too small a vocabulary to be useful, or the loose covers (back one fell off, front one leaked dust underneath it, obscuring the display) or the indifferent audio quality of the headphones supplied, because, at the end of the day, this is a phone for phone users, and it does its job there well.

Full review at Mobile Burn, includes pictures and considerable detail.