August 8th, 2007 - By: Alex Bailey
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First arriving in the mail a week ago, the Helio Ocean is one of the best phones I've ever used. The sleek pull out qwerty keyboard is easy to handle and still compact. The many features to keep in touch with the outside world are user friendly and run extremely fast on Sprint's 3G network. The numerous Ocean features appear to stop the iPhone and alike phones in their tracks.
Helio designed the Ocean with young people in mind. They made popular sites such as MySpace, Digg, and Flickr easy to use. You can upload pictures or videos to your Helio UP account in seconds. Once there it can be sent directly to Youtube or Flickr. There is a toggle to automatically upload the media once it's placed on an UP account. One downside to the image upload is the resolutions appear to be cut down smaller. There's also a nasty Helio logo in the bottom left of the image. Other means of retrieval eliminate the logo and the small resolution. However that requires you to hook the phone up to your computer with the included cord.
Keeping in touch is of course easy with the Ocean's built in Email clients. It supports basic email websites such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Earth Link. It downloads and parses through new emails quite fast; sometimes in seconds. You can send, delete, and read emails easily on the screen because of its perfect layout.
The camera quality on the Ocean is superb, taking brilliant high resolution pictures. The camera comes with a built in flash which can be toggled on/off/auto. The cameras take excellent pictures in the light (natural or lights), and pretty decent ones in dimmer light. However, once you hit night, the flash is almost useless. The only downside of the camera I see is the awkward placing of the lens. My fingers always seem to be right in front of it while trying to take a picture.
The Helio's qwerty keyboard is a bit awkward to use at first. However, within a few minutes you'll be typing extremely fast. Never have I typed on such an easy to use keyboard on a cell phone. In my opinion this keyboard is more comfortable and practical than that of a sidekick.
Internet on the Helio is about the same as any other phone. The screen is extremely small and not the easiest to navigate. However it's good if you need to get some quick information. Pages load on the 3G network relatively fast. Pages like Google load in seconds, but pages like eBay take as long as 20 seconds. Upon loading it automatically parses the web page for a phone's resolution. Clicking the up area reloads the page like it was intended to be loaded. This is a pretty cool feature on news sites where you just want to read the article.
The Helio's mp3 player is a bit disappointing. It plays music and videos fine, however, you can't make or receive calls while listening to music. In fact you can't text message or do anything while listening to music! This is a huge flaw in my opinion. I don't want to have to stop a song just to respond to a text message or something. For this reason I rarely use the music player.
Another thing on the Ocean that is troubling is it freezes a lot. Sometimes when doing a few things at once it will lag and take 1-20 seconds to go back to normal. During this time the screen will freeze on the same frame no matter what you do. This doesn't happen often, maybe once a day or so. Another downside is when you exit out of the internet it has to load back your desktop. The longer you were using the internet, the longer it takes to load. It gets to be a pain when you want to make a call directly after that.
Helio rents out Sprint's cell phone towers to provide their service. The reception in my area was average or below average. It did however make calls in most areas that I went to. The biggest trouble I have with it is reception in basements - where it started to get choppy. My old Verizon phone performed fine in such areas, thus I expected Sprint to. The internet on the Ocean is fairly fast when you have good reception. Even when you're not equipped with full bars, it's still pretty fast.
Overall the Helio is a pretty above average phone. The unlimited media features combined with the sleekly designed phone secure it as a competitor to the iPhone. While still a new phone, it has little things wrong with it. There are only a handful of things that I'd change on it.
