Helio Ocean Review - Messaging
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Richard Baguley Published on May 16, 2007 Comment on this |
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Supported Email Services (8.5) The ocean has excellent support for several email services; clients are included for POP3 and IMAP servers, Helio’s own mail service, plus Yahoo!, AOL, Windows Live, GMail and Earthlink email. That’s a great selection of services supported out of the box. Many other phones can access these services if you configure them yourself, or download extra software, but the Ocean supports them without having to do either.
Push Email (0.0)
The Ocean does not, however, support any of the commonly used push email systems; there is no support for BlackBerry or Exchange servers that push received email to you.
Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The Helio Ocean supports up to five or more separate email accounts.
HTML and Attachments (4.5)
The email client can handle basic HTML in email messages, and it can also handle attachments. These aren’t downloaded by default though; the email application will only download them if you specifically select them. Attachments cannot be directly viewed in the email program, but they can be saved (either to the internal memory or the memory card) or viewed as text. The latter option had mixed results; simple word documents could be viewed, but spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations didn’t work. And although attachments can be saved, forwarded and attached to emails, you can’t view the contents of the files directly.
Email Customizations (0.0)
The email client on the Ocean is not customizable: you can’t change the layout of the email, or customize how received emails are laid out. You don’t get much choice when it comes to fonts, either: only two fonts are on offer, and you can’t change the font size.
Time to a New Message (9.76)
In this test, we measure how long it takes to go from the phone in standby to starting to write a new email message. The Ocean was pretty quick at this as well; we found it took just 2.1 seconds to slide the keyboard out, hit menu, select the messaging app, select Send Email and choose the account to send the message from. That’s faster then most other devices with a QWERY keyboard; the Motorola Q, for instance, took 5.1 seconds to get to the new message screen.
Email Usability (9.5) The email program is pretty easy to use; emails are easy to compose using the QWERTY keyboard, and the email program is intuitively designed.
Supported IM Services (6.0)
Support for instant messaging is one of the strong points of the Ocean; it comes with support for Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger and Windows Live Messaging. But there is no support for ICQ, and given the proprietary nature of the Ocean’s OS, it is unlikely that we will see clients for other IM systems made available. The IM services are also well integrated into the contact application; if you have an IM name associated with a contact, you can IM them in as few steps as making a phone call. A small icon by the contact name also shows you if they are logged in; a very useful touch if you need to get hold of someone quickly.
MMS Support (6.0)
MMS is well supported on the Ocean; the camera application has presets for shooting images of the right size and resolution for attaching to MMS messages.
SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (2.0)
Smiley faces can be easily inserted into text and email messages with the emoticon option on the menu, which has 9 different smiles available. Howerver, these smiley icons are kept as text; they are not rendered as graphics
SMS/MMS Ease of Use (7.0)
The same program is sued for both email and SMS/MMS messages, and for both the program is easy to use and logically designed.
Time to a New SMS Message (3.23)
We found that getting to the new message screen for a text message took 3.1 seconds; the same as sending an email.
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