Helio Unveils New Dual Slider Mobile Phone
3/26/07 – Los Angeles-based mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Helio today unveiled Ocean, a 
dual-slider mobile phone combining a traditional numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard in a single device. The Ocean is planned for launch in spring of this year at a suggested retail price of $295, and is perhaps the most ambitious entry yet in Helio’s product line targeted to youth and young adults.
Helio says the phone is designed expressly for social networking, merging instant messages, text messages, picture messages and emails from all the major portals, Internet service providers and corporate Exchange servers, in one location. The company says Ocean also delivers full over-the-air music downloads, video-on-demand, a high-resolution camera, an HTML browser, MySpace on Helio, GPS-enabled Google Maps for mobile and Helio’s Buddy Beacon service.
“We started working on Ocean before Helio was officially a company,” said Dr. Wonhee Sull, president and COO of Helio. “We envisioned our ultimate device, what future members would want to carry, and with our company’s unique technology and design assets, we created a form factor and an experience that is a world’s first. Ocean is the result of the passionate dedication and hard work of countless innovative Helio employees and technology partners.”
Helio says that Ocean includes a huge, 2.4-inch, 260K color high-resolution QVGA display viewable in both portrait or landscape modes, external stereo speakers, a 2.0 megapixel camera with digital zoom and flash for photos and more than two hours of continuous video recording, Bluetooth for wireless voice and stereo Bluetooth for untethered music and videos, 200MB internal memory expandable via microSD to over 2GB, and USB Mass Storage Mode for drag-and-drop sideloading of content.
In addition, Helio says that Ocean features what the company calls an “integrated messaging dashboard” that includes access to Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, MSN Hotmail, Gmail, Helio Mail, and EarthLink email, as well as the ability to add additional email accounts. It also incorporates instant message access through Yahoo! Messenger, AOL’s AIM Service and Windows Live Messenger.
Helio says the advantage of this integrated messaging interface is that users don’t have to choose between text messages or picture messages—Ocean does all the work through one interface, automatically sending an SMS for text messages or an MMS when a picture or video is attached.
The Ocean’s camera will take advantage of a service called “Helio UP”, which lets users take a picture with their device, tag it with metadata including a title, description, keywords and location information and upload it directly to Helio Album, Helio’s photo service.
Helio – www.helio.com
