Nokia 3230

Discontinued
2nd November 2004

From time-to-time Nokia like to stir things up a bit, and the Nokia 3230 is one of those times. This handset's classification as a 3000-series phone means that Nokia are pitching it at the younger market, but this is no cheap and cheerful handset, indeed it sports Nokia's best digital camera to date.

In plain hardware terms, this is a tri-band GSM phone with GPRS. The Nokia 3230 has a large 176x220 pixel display in 65,000 colours and taked reduced size MMC (RS-MMC) cards, with a 32Mb card as standard. The Nokia 3230 can be connected to a headset, PC or other accessory via Bluetooth. There's stereo audio output for playing back audio and video files, and the 3230 can capture and edit video too. [please see this update on the 3230's MP3 capabilities]

The Nokia 3230 supports Java for games and other applications, and one interested bundled game is called Agent V which makes use of the camera and the inbuilt motion sensor (a feature borrowed from the 3220). The camera has an effective resolution of 1.23 megapixels for stills pictures, and these can be sent to a PC, via MMS (although the picture may degrade) or printed out using Kodak Mobile Services.

Although the 3230 can play back MP3, audio and video files, the 32Mb included as standard isn't enough and you'll want to expand that. It does come with a built-in FM radio with a feature called "visual radio" which gives additional information and features, a feature from the new Nokia 7710. In addtion to all this, there's an XHTML browser and email client too, running on the Symbian Series 60 OS. It's not quite a Smartphone in software terms, but it's close.

The Nokia 3230 is a real grab bag of interesting features taken from other phones in the Nokia range, borrowing from handsets as diverse at the 7710, 3220, 7610, 3300 and others. This is an important and interesting handset as a result, even though it's probably somewhat under the shadow of the Nokia 7710 announced at the same time, and we hope that Nokia will produce many other phones based on similar specifications in the near future.

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