Helio Ocean Review - Conclusion
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Richard Baguley Published on May 16, 2007 Comment on this |
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Who's It For
Business User
Business users won’t find the Ocean to be a good fit; the email program can’t organize the large amounts of email that they need to organize, and the lack of support for viewing and editing documents means they won’t be able to keep on top of things on the road.
Budget Callers
The Ocean is an expensive phone at $245, especially when the networks are offering phones like the RAzr for much less when you sign up for a new contract. Budget callers may want to wait a few months for the price of the handset to fall.
Chatty Teenager
The teenager who likes to talk, SMS and IM will love the Ocean. It supports most of the major IM networks out of the box, and the large keyboard is great for chatting over SMS, IM or email. And the GPS Buddy Beacon feature will be useful when they are looking to hook up at the mall; no more teenage arguments over which Starbucks they were supposed to meet outside of.
Media Maven
The Ocean is a decent audio and video player, but it is a little cramped by the lack of support for DRM protected audio, and the fact it only plays back one video format. And media mavens with large music and video collections will find the lack of any music and video synch software a pain; they will have to convert video files by hand and manually copy the files over. That will change (Ocean is coming out with audio and video sync software soon), but in the meantime, media mavens will be better suited going for a phone with more developed media support.
Conclusion
The Ocean is an impressive device; the hardware is well designed and nicely built. It’s an impressive piece of engineering to squeeze two sliders into a device less than an inch thick, and the Ocean certainly impresses in most respects. The keyboard is comfortable to use and quick to type on, and the keypad is pretty good as well. And the Ocean itself comes with a great selection of features out of the box; it supports more email and IM services than most phones, and has some great additional other features, such as the Buddy Beacon GPS tracking and the mobile version of Google Maps built in.
The Ocean also has great integration with Helio’s online services; uploading images and videos to their online photo album takes just a couple of clicks, and they can then be quickly transferred into a MySpace page as well. If you have more than one Helio phone, the company offers you the slightly unusual ability to switch between the phones through their web site; just pick the phone to use, and your calls are automatically routed to the selected phone. It sounds odd, but it works surprisingly well; the selected phone is activated in a couple of seconds, so you can pick and choose which phone you want to use; a smaller one like the drift if you are going out for the evening, or the Ocean if you want to send emails.
But there are some limitations. Although the Ocean supports plenty of IM and email services, the proprietary OS means that there is only limited support for third party programs to support additional services; if they aren’t supported out of the box, you’re mostly out of luck.
And some of the built-in features are limited; the GPS system can’t log where you have been, and the document viewing feature didn’t work with most of the files we tried it on. The anemic nature of some of the built-in software (such as the rather basic web browser and the limited features of the email client) is also a limitation, and it is rather annoying that you can’t play music in the background; the audio player has to be the only thing running, which is a pain if you like a soundtrack while you are IMing. It’s a pity that the online integration isn’t taken a step further to allow you to upload images to services like Flickr or a blog; that would widen the appeal for those who like to put their lives online.
These limitations are irritating, but overall the Ocean does a very good job of what it does; it is pretty small, has a decent keyboard and has decent software that allows you to stay in touch on the road. It won’t replace a BlackBerry for serious emailers and business users, but for those who want a good combination of phone, IM, email and a few extras (and don’t mind the limitations), it’s a great choice.
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