Helio Ocean set to make a splash

Stephen Withers
Monday, 26 March 2007 17:36

Your IT - Mobility

Helio's Ocean looks set to cause a major splash in the mobile phone world with a unique dual-slider design to provide a regular phone keypad plus a full QWERTY keyboard in one device.

For starters, it's a full-function 3G phone with a 2MP camera, Bluetooth (including stereo support), 200M of internal memory (expandable to over 2G with microSD cards and accessible via USB) and GPS.

The Ocean's multimedia capabilities support MP3, AAC and WMA audio, plus MPEG-4 and H.264 video. Subscription and outright purchase music services are supported.

Battery life is supposed to be good for 15 hours of music or 5 hours of talk time.

Want mail? The Ocean boasts an "integrated messaging dashboard" with access to mail services from Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google, Helio and EarthLink, plus support for IMAP/POP3 accounts. Throw in Yahoo, AOL and Windows Live IM (with 'presence detection' for your buddies across multiple services), and support for synchronising with Exchange Server and most bases are covered.

Yes, there's a web browser too, one that the company claims can be used to "vist WAP sites or surf any Web site on the Internet." 

The suggested retail price is $US295, and the device is supposed to go on sale later this spring.

Is this the device that will take the wind out of Apple's iPhone sails?