Pros & Cons
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- Dual-slider design for phone and QWERTY keypads.
- Flexible messaging software.
- Very good screen and camera.
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- Many features aren't quite here yet, but Helio promises they're coming.
- Quiet speakerphone.
Helio Ocean (Pantech PN-810) Specs
| Screen Size | 2.4 |
The best current social-networking device, the Helio Ocean, takes the
The Ocean is also an interesting kind of smart device—let's call it a pseudo-smartphone. The
The Ocean, Sidekick, and iPhone take a middle path. Helio has covered the Ocean with to features yet to be born hidden away in the menu and promises a steady stream of upgrades and changes—entirely under Helio's control. Third-party apps, meanwhile, must be written in WIPI Java and WIPI C, which are languages little known outside of Korea, but Helio has already brought on board big-name partners such as Google. That shows a vision similar to what Steve Jobs has described for the iPhone—strictly controlled, but with a continually expanding set of features and functions.
A moderately large, heavy device (4.3 by 2.2 by 0.9 and 5.6 ounces), the Ocean is still smaller than a
For a phone using Sprint's physical EV-DO network, reception is decent, and audio is deep and clear, though the speakerphone will be too quiet for some tastes. I did find one irritating reception quirk. If you are in an area with very patchy Sprint signal and the phone roams onto Verizon, it will take longer to return to a native Sprint signal than with, say, a
If all you want to do is talk, you wouldn't be buying this device. Just open the keyboard and start typing, and you start seeing serious innovation. When you hit a letter or number, all your contacts starting with that letter or number pop up on the screen, and you can narrow the list down with more keypresses. If you keep going beyond any names in your address book, you can execute a Web metasearch for whatever you're typing, bringing together results from Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, and Yelp in tabs.—
Mondo Messaging
The Ocean's integrated messaging client is the biggest reason to get this device. Press "down" on the cursor pad at the home screen and you get to the e-mail/IM client, which supports (unthreaded) text messaging, AOL, Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo!, and POP/IMAP e-mail (including the free 100MB account you get with a Helio subscription), as well as AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo!. You can log in to all three IM services at once, and you can receive "push" e-mail from AOL, Windows Live, and Yahoo!. For the rest of the services, you have to download e-mail by hand: There isn't even a scheduled polling option.
The messaging app is completely integrated into the contact book, including presence detection. This means that if you look at your contact list, you'll see who's online with IM. That's pretty dang neat. You can also sync the contact list with Yahoo!, AOL, or Helio's own Web client, but the Yahoo! and AOL sync options, weirdly, prevent you from ever adding a different service's IM address to that contact. (In other words, folks from your Yahoo! address book can be contacted only through Yahoo!) In addition, the contact book holds a breathtakingly vast 4,500 possible names.
That said, reading e-mail is easy but basic. There's no HTML or embedded image support, and the only attachments you can look at are graphics files. You can receive images through IM, though, which is a good touch.
The messaging app is the only thing that can run in the background on the Ocean. When you get a new e-mail, a dialog box appears, and you can press the upper-right soft key to start reading. There's no easy way to flip among, say, IM, Web surfing, and e-mail, though.
The Ocean also supports Helio's MySpace client and something called Helio UP, which lets you upload your cameraphone photos to MySpace or blogs. Helio UP didn't work on the device I had, though, and Helio said it was one of the Ocean's many "coming soon" features (see sidebar:
Beyond Messaging
The Ocean is more than just a messaging device, which is one of the qualities that takes it beyond the Sidekick.
There's a full Web browser in here, for instance, and it's powerful, but quirky. Initially, it shows you sites processed through the Google Mobilizer, which boils everything down to a basic, one-column view. You then have to click a link at the bottom of a page to go to the full HTML view, and the browser will stay in HTML mode for the rest of the session. That's a bit awkward, and I wish there was a setting you could change to eliminate that extra step. You have both one-column and widescreen views available in the HTML browser, and there's a very good zoom function to change font and graphic sizes. The browser supports JavaScript but not Java or Flash.
The phone's music player supposedly syncs with PCs to play MP3, WMA, and AAC music files, including purchased WMAs. (However, I couldn't get Napster to play nice with the phone.) You can drop files onto a memory card using the Ocean's mass-storage mode, or use a "Music/Video Sync" mode to sync directly with Windows Media Player 10 or above, including syncing playlists. I found the Music/Video Sync mode to be frustrating, as it connected successfully to only one of three PCs I tried (and it won't sync video at all—see the sidebar about upcoming features). Dragging and dropping using the mass-storage mode worked just fine, even with a Mac, so that's the better option. Once the music is in the phone, it can be sorted by album, artist, or genre, and played through the built-in speakers in stereo Bluetooth headphones or wired headphones connected to the standard 2.5mm jack (helpfully, an adapter for 3.5mm music headphones is provided). You can't multitask music with any activity other than Web surfing.
The 2MP camera does a good job, all told, balancing light and dark areas in outdoor shots well, though it has the usual shutter-speed problems that cameraphones have in low light. The video mode takes somewhat jerky 320-by-240 videos at 8 frames per second.
The Ocean will be a terrific gaming device as well, once games are written for it. I tested a set of Gameloft demos designed specifically for it. When you're playing an Ocean game, you turn the phone horizontally and all the soft keys come into play—suddenly, you have a widescreen device with a cursor pad and action buttons at all four corners of the screen. That's potentially very exciting.
Helio made a few other apps available the first week of the Ocean's release, including a GPS-enabled version of Google Maps, a live traffic application for drivers, and Buddy Beacon, which lets you locate your friends with GPS-enabled Helio phones on a map.
Should You Dive In?
The Helio Ocean is a very good phone, and I think it will get better. It's already more capable than the Sidekick 3, with a far more professional design than the Sidekick's junior-high-school look. Yet even so, it's more attuned to the needs of the IM-and-MySpace set than even the hippest BlackBerry.
At the moment, the Helio Ocean is a bit of a rough cut. I'd like to see Helio saw away at that "to do" list for a little while. But in the middle space of messaging phones, the Ocean already rules the roost: It's far more multimedia-capable than the Sidekick, with far better everything—well, pretty much everything—than the LG enV, the Samsung SCH-U740, and other QWERTY non-smartphones. That's enough for me to give Helio's best effort a very hopeful, if slightly cautious, Editors' Choice.—
Helio's "To Do" List
The Ocean feels like a Version 1.0 product, with a long list of features yet to be built in. But Helio's taking a PC-like approach here. Instead of requiring users to get a new Ocean, it will send through a stream of updates as it fixes and adds things. Or at least that's what the company says. Here's a look at Helio's "to do" list.
- Local PC syncing. The Ocean supports something called "Helio Sync" mode, and when you plug it into a PC, it demands drivers that currently aren't available. I hope this will lead to some sort of ability to sync contacts and calendars locally with your PC.
- Video syncing. The "Music/Video Sync" mode syncs only music right now. To sync video, you have to re-encode your files into 3GPP format by hand, with some picky specs. A "Helio Player" application in the future will smooth the video-syncing issues.
- A competitive music store. Helio's $1.99 over-the-air music downloads come down only to your phone, not your PC, making them a poor value. That will be changed when Helio Player arrives. I had some problems successfully downloading DRM-licensed tracks from Helio over-the-air store, as well.
- Exchange ActiveSync. The ability to sync contacts, calendars, and e-mail over the air with Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 or newer servers will make the Ocean business-ready, although it isn't ready yet.
- More and better push e-mail. Aside from Exchange, Helio plans to be able to push its own and Earthlink's mail accounts. No word on Gmail yet.
- More and better social networking. Apparently, both GPS tagging and many other photo-sharing sites will be available through the Helio UP photoblogging plug-in.
- Attachment support. According to Helio, the ability to view and edit Microsoft Office documents will come soon.
Benchmark Test Results
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 6 minutes
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Final Thoughts
Helio Ocean (Pantech PN-810)
While the T-Mobile Sidekick stood still, Helio moved forward. The wireless service provider's new Ocean handset fits neatly between the juvenile Sidekick and the buttoned-down BlackBerry as an all-around multimedia handheld.