So, I’m happy with my Helio Ocean (though, of course, this is often the case with sunk costs.) But there are a lot of nits. And, aside from the location-awareness of the Ocean, it doesn’t hold a candle to the iPhone.

In any case, I’m sure there are still people out there not willing to shell out the extra $200-$300 for an iPhone, so here are some notes from an old email thread between Ben and me. Perhaps it will end up being useful to someone.

Here’s me, writing up quick notes for a friend who helps manage Voce, an MVNO based in LA:

first thoughts on the ocean: very cool, with lots of potential and a couple killer apps. however, lacking in polish.

the gps-linked apps are incredibly cool. having google maps and google local in your pocket are really empowering, especially as someone who walks and bikes a lot. the camera, video, and messaging features are pretty good, too.

some random annoyances (there are many more): - extremely poor integration and sync with OS X. almost nonexistent, actually. - terrible rings - weird defaults, like no predictive texting, but a korean mode

ben may have other comments (he got one, too.)

Ben added:

the form factor is actually a huge plus. this is my first phone with a qwerty. i wouldn’t carry a trio because you look like a tool when you do that. but now that i’ve had IM and email on my phone, it would be hard to do without. there’s a few other phone designs out there too with flip-down or flip-open or whatever to hide the keyboard — but the ocean is the one that doesn’t look janky when you slide it open the other way for a call. it just looks like a regular slider phone. so qwerty without nerdy is a big asset.

they’ve done an incredibly good job of making a phone that slides two ways make sense visually and layout-wise. i know i can press down on the d-pad to get to messages. down is down, and the phone knows from the slider which way i have it open. nice. also, they pull together “alerts” like new voicemail, new IMs, and new texts all in one screen with a hotkey. good idea. i can keep it on silent and then come back in a hour and see at a glance everything that’s going on.

the gps is good, like eric says. but the “buddy beacon” is crap — mapquest instead of google maps, only works one direction, only updates your position when you run it, only offers you one level of “friendship”. either someone is your friend or not according to helio. i’d like to be able to let some people track me all the time, but only update others when i want to. i feel like this will improve over time. another minor quibble: can’t check all your email accounts at once. instead, you have to go into each one and tell it to check mail. dumb.

also, the phone feels really “closed”. for example, you can’t just plug it in via usb and pull off your photos and upload music. unless you’ve put them on the microsd card. and you can’t get at rings or background screens at all via usb. it’s like they were imagining that they could make ringtones a big revenue stream by locking them up. sucks coming from a sony where you’re listening to an mp3 and you can say “make this my ringtone”. and the media player sucks — it takes like 45 seconds to load every time, i think it’s re-scanning all your mp3 id3 tags or something. also, battery life is short! (well, if you use the hell out of it, which i have been, because now i can IM and text all the time easily.)

last point against it: bad bluetooth support. pretty much all it can do is use a headset. there’s no file browsing via bluetooth, no sending a contact to someone via bluetooth, no using your phone as a mouse on the computer, and most of all no using the 3g as an internet connection for your computer. again, this is versus sony which does a great job on all that stuff.

so, summary: needs to be more media-savvy, more consumer-focused, needs another generation in order to be refined. but a good feature set and a good form factor. i’m keeping it.

Related Posts:

• Getting Address Book Contacts to Helio (May, 2007)
• Fastmail.FM Sux0rs (November, 2005)
• Renewable Energy Density and Carbon Flows (June, 2007)
• Star Trek Communicator (October, 2005)
• Mass Production is Egalitarian (October, 2008)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under personal, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.