Helio Ocean Review

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com>]

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A Helio Ocean Review from a Sidekick 3 user's perspective

So the Helio Ocean is a "semi-smart" phone much like the Sidekick 3.
In this day and age, the Sidekick needs massive updating to compete
with the features of any modern phone and T-Mobile is too dumb to
replace broken Sidekick's for free for long time users. So I got a
Helio Ocean. Here are a list of features the Helio Ocean has the
Sidekick does not. Keep in mind both phones cost pretty much the same
thing, although you can get a Sidekick for as low as $99 with a new
two year contract from T-Mobile (which is crazy - they should be free
since they're as old as the hills, but whatever).

Helio Ocean features that beat the Sidekick:
o GPS+Google Maps App. This has saved my ass at least once when lost
in Dallas with a cabbie intent on ripping me off. Extremely usable
application - you can say things like "Sushi near me" and find your
local sushi restaurants. Works great even inside since it uses the
cell phone towers to triangulate you. This is essentially a killer
app, the second killer app being the Video Camera+YouTube integration.
I'd try "Buddy Beacon" which tells all your friends where you are, but
I don't have friends with Helio phones. Everyone else seems to have
either an iPhone or a TracPhone (30 bucks from CVS)

o Video camera and normal camera that does not suck like the
Sidekick's does

o number pad for dialing phone numbers (whee!)

o Lots more applications you can download, but you'll never use any of
them because they want an astonishing 3 dollars a day for most of
them. So this doesn't count.

o "3G" I know people want this, but frankly, it's not worth even
listing as a "Feature" since it's no faster than anything else you've
ever used. This doesn't count either. I've tested the iPhone, and it's
just as fast, if not faster.

o Cheap and good plans. Nothing from Helio will break your piggy bank.
They don't nickle and dime you the way AT&T does if you buy an iPhone,
and the overall plan is cheaper than T-Mobile's.

o Better phone call quality.

o Good customer support from cheery southern chicks (T-Mobile is also
quite good). None of the customer support at Helio appeared to have
ever used the Helio Ocean, but some of the second level support had
and could answer questions like "Why doesn't file download work" with
"You need a microsd card"

o Helio UP lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube. This is
pretty awesome really. Works well for daily videos of your small child
for the extended family. You can have the phone tag the videos with
the geolocation theoretically, although I can't figure out how to get
that data back from YouTube.

o Helio UP sends pictures to MySpace. I'm not sure why you'd want them
on MySpace rather than say, Google Picasa. There's no Google Picasa
option. I find I never use this.


The downsides of the Helio Ocean are:
o Slightly worse keyboard than sidekick. Not horrible, just slightly
worse.

o The GUI is terrible. Why a cell phone GUI should have lag is
something I've never understood. I should not be typing on the AIM
client and have it start missing characters because I'm typing too
fast. Is the thing doing character mode and sending each character to
the server? That would be insane, but I'm not ruling it out.

o Basic UI design concepts are missing from the Helio designer's
brains. For example, most people on the Sidekick will load a web page
by hitting the "Web Browser" button, then typing an address, and then
they will put the sidekick back into their pocket and come back to it
later when the web page is there. Or perhaps they will AIM for a bit
while the web page loads. This is impossible on the Helio since it
runs one application at a time. Starting and stopping the web browser
takes about 10 seconds, which is infuriating once you start wanting to
use it.

o Gmail doesn't appear to accept my password so I can't use GMail on
the phone. Not sure why. Tech support has no idea either.

o When the Helio is running the web browser, that's all it does. If
you close the phone, the web browser app closes too. This is retarded
beyond belief. Was opera too expensive to license or something? The
web browser is the worst thing ever. It's slightly faster than the
GPRS the Sidekick uses, but navigating on it is nearly impossible.
Useful only for reading headlines on Google News. Slashdot is
impossible on it, but digg works well.

o The camera app has some very strange bugs. Examples:
    o Using the camera vertically can only do 300X200 (crappy). Using
it horizontally with the keyboard out works really well.
   o You have to choose between External (MicroSD - 1Gig for 30 bucks
at Circuit City) or Internal storage. You cannot copy photos or videos
from Internal to your Mac using USB. You can copy them from External,
but you cannot email things or use "Helio UP" from External. So either
way you're screwed. There's a 2.5 meg limit (30 seconds) on videos
when you want to email them to yourself or "helio up" them. So I
recommend using "Internal" and then only moving things externally when
you want to copy them to your hard drive. This is awkward, to say the
least.

o Built in email and text messenging is slightly worse than Sidekicks.
Only downloads first 1000 characters of emails for example. Just
essentially worse applications here in every way.

o No way to easily say "Get me a new GPS location" while in Google
Maps application other than restarting application.


IN CONCLUSION:
The iPhone has no GPS or Video camera, or AIM, and is horribly
expensive. If they added a GPS and Video Camera and someone finished a
nice AIM application that runs in their web browser, they'd be
best-of-breed in every area.

Overall Helio Ocean is not a terrible phone. It's a good phone, with a
terrible UI and web browser. GPS and YouTube integration will make you
like it while you wait for Apple to get iPhone version 2.0 out the
door. But if I had to purchase it again, I'd probably get an iPhone.

- -dave

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