Helio Ocean Phone Review

Look and feel: There’s no question that the Ocean’s a big phone: at 4.3 by 2.2 by 0.9 inches and about 5.6 ounces, the Ocean is nearly as big and heavy as my Treo (although it’s noticeably smaller than the bulky Sidekick). But while it makes for a tight fit in a jeans pocket, the Ocean’s nice curves and rubberized shell felt good in my hands. As for its twin keypads, I’m a bigger fan of the full-QWERTY keypad than of the numeric one. Don’t get me wrong—I love the two-way slider concept, which keeps you from having to guess which QWERTY keys are for dialing and which aren’t—but the thin, curved rows of numeric keys were tricky to press. The roomy QWERTY keypad was a pleasure, however, and I especially appreciated the dedicated “@” key for composing e-mail messages.

In the box: The Ocean comes with a solid set of accessories, including a wired stereo headset, a USB cable, and an adapter for earphones with standard 3.5mm minijacks—a nice change from the carriers who ship their phones with no accessories at all. There’s no included microSD card for memory expansion, but the Ocean’s generous 200MB of internal memory (good for a few dozen songs) will tide you over until you get one.

Interface: I’ve been a fan of Helio’s user interfaces in the past, and I’m pleased to report that the Ocean’s menu system looks even better now; previously tough-to-use features (like conference calling) are much easier to use now, and I never lost my way through the myriad options. I just wish the whole experience was a bit more unified; there’s nothing like the Sidekick’s “Jump” button that takes you back to the main menu. Also, a jog dial or trackball would be a welcome addition (my thumb kept reaching for a trackball that wasn’t there).

Messaging: Outstanding—I especially liked the Ocean’s unified messaging screen, which shows you at a glance the status of your e-mail and instant messaging accounts. You get out-of-the-box support for Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, Windows Live Mail and Gmail, along with all their respective IM services (save Google’s), and Helio is promising Exchange ActiveSync support for corporate servers later this year. A couple of things are missing, though: the Ocean won’t automatically fetch your POP/IMAP messages (you have to collect them manually), and HTML-formatted e-mail messages are stripped of their formatting—then again, my pricey Treo 700p (and the Sidekick 3, for that matter) has the same problem.

Web browsing: The Ocean’s mobile Web browser earns high marks, but it falls just shy of the bar set by Nokia. Web surfing was quite speedy, faster even than on my 3G Treo, and the cool zoom feature instantly zooms text and images up to 200 percent (or down to 50 percent). The browser borrows Nokia’s mini-map so you can see your position relative to the rest of the page, which is a nice touch. The Ocean’s browser puts HTML pages through Google’s mobile optimizer by default; you can scroll to the bottom of a page and click a link to see the full HTML version, but you can’t turn the option off altogether, which was a bit annoying. Also, the browser struggled to render full HTML pages correctly; it couldn’t display the Yahoo! front page at all, and the IMDB front page looked jumbled (Nokia’s Web browser breezed through those tests). Still, I’ll take the Ocean’s browser over almost any other mobile browser out there, including the Sidekick’s.

More info can be found: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/1442