Recently a family member decided to
change his phone and I was requested to shortlist a few phones which had the
following features

No
flip or slider phone.
Decent
amount of internal memory.
2 MP
camera w or w/o auto focus.
Bluetooth Cable
connectivity to computer.
A good
screen with at least 65k colours.
FM
radio.
Decent
music capability.
At
least 500 phone book capacity, which allows multiple entries per contact

With these points in mind I short-listed the Sony Ericsson
W810i & Nokia N72. but I thought the N72 was a bit bulky for my relative
& so we went to buy the phone. But when we went to the dealer (most of our
phones have been bought from this guy as he gives us a good overall deal), he
suggested the new (at that time) Nokia 6233. I was not impressed, as this phone
had just been introduced in the market then, he gave me many reasons why not to
opt for the W810i (in spite of it being more expensive).We gave in to his pleading of ‘at least have a look at
it’.

We did and
the rest is now history as my relative was quite impressed but it s looks as
well as its price J. Frankly I was quite nervous of, according to me ‘an
unknown entity’; especially after my bro’s experience with the Nokia 6230i
(another review here). I didn’t even know how much internal memory it had (more
on that later). Anyway the deal was done the old Nokia 6610 went out for 2k and
in came the 6233. its been a few months now so I can safely say that its been
safely tested n our hands. I won’t bore you with the specs as that can be had @
their web site.

At first
looks it looks very impressive as it quite slim (as compared to the N series),
has a stainless frame & an overall black look (this piece). This phone is
very handy in operation, especially b’coz of its keypad. The buttons in the
side vertical rows stick out slightly; all keys have very soft click and great
feel to it. The usual (I say this as I have owned a 5110 & 3100 in the
past) four-way navigation key and the “OK” button inside it are also very easy
to manage.

It uses currently S40 3rd edition operating system.

Flight Mode. This was a new feature for me
& was taken in by it, The phone part can be turned off in case you are in a
plane or wherever mobile phones are prohibited, imagine having the phone in the
off mode and @ the same time listening to the music or radio thru the phone.
Can be useful sometimes.
Calls list. Pressing the call key brings up
the list of dialed numbers only. But, requires not only making, but also
receiving calls. I frequently need to call back people, whose calls I’ve missed
– when there are more than two of them, it’s impossible to do that without
having to peek in the calls record. To access to general list, you will need to
perform at least 3-4 actions, and this is pretty much inconvenient.
BlueTooth-devices searching. The handset is
always searching for new devices located nearby; you can’t pick a device
residing in the list of already paired ones, and thus end up by having to spend
a bit more time.
Incoming messages. The display doesn’t
offer the information on sender – only amount of messages (e.g you have one
unread message),
Phonebook has only 500 entries to fill, but
other standard for all business solutions made by Nokia was 1000 entries (like
the 6230i which is an older vintage)this could be b’coz it does not have enough
internal memory and firmware in spite of being a of 3G phones.
Themes. There are few themes preinstalled,
they are all-standard and do not offer main menu’s icon customization, It is
easy to download new themes, which are a lot more colorful and interesting than
standard ones. But be warned if the themes are too big it will slow the phone
down drastically to the extent u might get a white screen for a long time
enough to scare u to think it has hung. Again b’coz of the piddly amount of
memory. I really find this shocking as the older 6230i has 64 MB internal
memory. If you want to download themes for free or share it with others check
out http://www11.ownskin.com/index . This site has a good collection for Nokia
& Sony Ericsson phones.
Voice dialing. Tags automatically get
assigned to contacts in the phonebook, without having to train before
Copy & Move files is a very primitive operation
as u cannot move/copy files to sub folders.

Coz of space constraints this review continues in the comments section :)

Purchase Price:	13k+
Talk time (minutes):	No Comment