Helio Ocean – the Sidekick killer
The days of the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 seem to be numbered, now that the new Helio Ocean is here. I’ve written about the Sidekick 3 before, but this new gadget so out-beats it, with a nice dual-way slide design and a great multimedia and office related functions.
I must repeat that the Helio Ocean is a dual slider, an it has a numeric keypad (slide down) and a full QWERTY keyboard (slide sideways). Of course, it is not the first device with this kind of technology, but is one of the sleekest and the best looking ones. Being slim but yet incredible powerful, it is almost clear that this toy plans to take down the Sidekick 3, which is now the best sold mobile phone in the US. With 0.86″ (22 mm), the Ocean can’t compete with the Samsung Ultra thin phones, but after all, that’s not its purpose at all.
Helio Ocean: two way slider with a great brain
With the Helio Ocean you don’t get just the looks but also tons of features:
- 2 Mps camera with flash
- 2,4″ screen (320 x 240 px resolution)
- Bluetooth connectivity and 3G network capabilities
- GPS services with Google Maps support
- MySpace Mobile access
- Helio Music, Playforsure and UP multimedia functions
- 200 MB of internal storage space + a microSD card
The Software is a good point of the Helio Ocean, offering integration and support for various applications, like AIM, Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live. The phone can read PDF documents but unfortunately no Office or Flash ones. No java applications are supported either. An interesting feature is the direct web search, bringing results from Yahoo, Google or even Wikipedia in just fractions of seconds. Ocean‘s integrated messaging dashboard includes easy access to all the major TXT/SMS/Email types of messages.
Helio Ocean brings a numeric keypad and a full QWERTY keyboard
In the Multimedia segment, I should mention that the Helio Ocean insures music playback for an estimated 15 hours of continuous audio. That can almost compete the iPod and certainly beats the competitors from the mobile phones segment.
An interesting gadget this Helio Ocean. Taking into consideration its accessible price of around 300$ and the advantages brought by the 3G services, this will certainly be a success, especially among teenagers. I wonder if this will also get to Europe, cause i would really like to get my hands on the Helio Ocean for a couple of hours.
Source: Gizmodo
Mike is an Editor at Gadgetroad.com. He's the 'let him write' type of guy, with a great focus on getting the job done and, like all of us, a passionate gadget lover with many years of tech background.
