I’ve been aware of Helio for a long time but it wasn’t until recently that I actually wanted a phone from them.
Luckily the last issue of Technology Review that I will receive before my subscription expires had a great article on the trials and tribulations that Helio has gone through. By the way, Technology Review is a great magazine, however it’s a bit too “sciency” and not enough “techy” for my tastes.
Essentially the ocean is a phone with a revolutionary design. It sports a unique three way spring that allows the phone to slide vertically for making phone calls, and horizontally for a full QWERTY keyboard to type with.
A few amazing features include the ultimate inbox:
Ocean’s integrated messaging dashboard includes out-of-the-box built-in access to AOL email and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! email and Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, EarthLink email and Helio Mail. Ocean will also support push mail from Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN Hotmail, as well as Mail for Microsoft Exchange
Also the Google Maps friends locator, and the 2.4 inch screen that rotates based on orientation. If you are playing a video game the device needs to be rotated so that the d-pad is situated on the left hand side like a normal controller. Probably one of the biggest draws is it’s HTML browser.
Dual-slide for both number pad and full QWERTY. 3G for screaming downloads. Two-megapixel camera with flash, GPS, full HTML browser, 2.4-inch 260k colour QVGA display, on-board stereo speakers, 200MB of internal memory and microSD for more than 2GB more, USB Mass Storage Mode with PC and Mac compatibility… I’m throwing all this out in one fat chunk because if I were to talk you through it we’d be here all day.
I would ditch my BlackBerry Pearl for this baby in a heartbeat. Now if it was only available in Canada…