  For a few months now, I've wanted to buy a new cellphone. I currently own two Nokia GSM-based phones, both dual band, one of which works in India, and another which works in the US. So having one tri-band phone that works in both places, would make a little sense. I'm a big Nokia fan, and no amount of features can tear me away from the brand.
I compared the following phones (all Nokia) that are currently available in India: 6220 - Rs 14,200 6230 - Rs 22,000 6610 - Rs 9,200 6610i - Rs 11,200 7250i - Rs 10,800 The above-mentioned prices are in INR and were correct as of July 15, 2004 in Chennai, India. I compared the phones using urlLink Nokia's Phone Comparison tool . The 6610i is similar to the 6610, with some additional features like the built-in digital camera, and more memory. Though I don't need the digital camera (I have a 5.1 MP Sony Cybershot), I'd still prefer the 6610i for it's larger memory and Silver-grey casing. In my area the 6610 is only available in Black - which looks pretty sleek, but pales in comparison to the Silver-grey.
The 7250i didn't impress me at all with respect to the other phones, and I dropped that pretty early on during my comparison. The main thing I didn't like was its look. I'd had my eye on the 6200 for quite a while when I was in the US. The 6220 is the newer cousin of that phone with a built-in digital camera and video recorder. It's also got support for TCP/IP, EDGE and SMTP/POP3/IMAP4, which I'll probably never use, but are features that might prove useful in the long run. The 6230 is the new cousin of the 6220 and has Bluetooth capability, a 64k color display (the others only support 4k colors), can play MP3s, and has more memory. The best feature of the 6230 is that is supports addition of an MMC which can be upto 512MB. My laptop (an HP Pavilion zv5000 series) too has a built-in MMC drive.
The phone is also a little smaller, but doesn't have the good design of the 6220. All phones are GPRS-enabled. For reasons that I'm somewhat unable to fathom at this moment, I selected the 6220. I then went on to compare it with the current hot favourite - the Sony Ericsson T610. The phone costs round Rs 11,000, and has all the features of the Nokia 6230 (except the video recorder and the MMC slot), with a bonus USB port. Which means that I can use a standard USB cable (the same one that connects my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX MP3 player and my Sony Cybershot DSC-P10 Digital Camera to my laptop), to connect the phone to any PC. With Nokia I need to buy a data cable which costs Rs 1,100. Which means I could by two T610s for the cost of a Nokia 6230, and (counting the cost of the cable) still have money to spare.
The 6220 wouldn't cost as much as the 6230, but would still cost more than the T610, with a significantly lesser number of features. You'd think that after all this research I'd be rushing to the Sony-Ericsson store to get that phone. Instead, I'm still thinking about the Nokia 6220, because I don't like the idea of buying any phone other than a Nokia. Call me crazy. 
