Nokia 6233

The Nokia 6233 isn’t presently available through any of the Canadian providers, so if you want one you’ll have to order it online or buy it at a retailer that carries one. The camera in the 6233 is 2-megapixel type and of approximately equal quality to the one provided in the 6265i. It takes good photographs, but like all Nokia cameras, it suffers from too much noise in the shadows (even in well-lit pictures). As I’ve often noted, this makes it difficult to use software such as Photoshop to fix the shadows & highlights to compensate for a poor exposure. Bringing up the shadows just makes the noise more obvious.



On the other hand, the videos that the 6233 can capture are light years better than any other phone I've tested. While the results wouldn't hold a candle to those from a digital camcorder, they are shocking good nonetheless. Instead of some ridiculously low resolution (typically 176 x 144) the 6233 can render video at an amazing 640 x 480 (virtually at NTSC resolution of 720 x 480). The frame rate is a little slower than standard TV and when lots of things change from frame to frame (such as during a pan) the quality seems less than great, but for normal levels of motion it's really excellent.
Data compression in the video recordings is also kept to a minimum, thus ridding the video of those super-annoying compression blocks that mess up the results from most other phones. However, it means that videos recorded at this rate are quite large. A 27-second sample video Howard & I made turned out to be almost 6.5 MB in size. While approximately 14 MB per minute is a far cry from the almost 220 MB per minute consumed by DV tapes, it's a big step forward for cell phones.
Note that the phone supports various lower-resolution settings (including 176 x 144, and even a super-low-res video mode of 128 x 56) and various higher compression settings. To get the results noted above you have to set all of the video settings to their highest levels.



Bluetooth: While support of Bluetooth isn't anything unusual these days, the support of the A2DP profile is. Only the most recent version of the firmware adds support for this profile, but it shouldn't be difficult to get your copy of the phone updated if you have an older version that doesn't offer A2DP.
So what's this A2DP profile all about? It's essentially a high-fidelity stereo standard that allows you to listen to full-fidelity music through headsets that connect to the phone via Bluetooth. I was quite impressed with the implementation for 2 reasons, the most obvious being the ability to listen to MP3 files in full-fidelity. However, the profile was much more tolerant of bit errors than the standard headset profile when used to take calls. This means that you rarely get any of that robotic quality that occurs with standard Bluetooth headsets when there is interference to the signal.



This is a very impressive Nokia phone, and with its excellent over-the-road showing during my tests it might well be the best-behaved model to come from them in ages. Its lack of 850 MHz support however, will put some people off, especially those who travel extensively in rural parts of the country. Those who use their phones almost exclusively in urban settings won’t find that missing 850 MHz is a huge problem, but I’ll leave that argument to the 850-is-next-to-godliness debaters on HowardForums.