Helio Ocean Feature by Feature Review

We’ve had lots of time to use, re-use, and digest every feature available on the Helio Ocean. We’ve done UI videos, hardware galleries, handset sharing tutorials and sync tutorials, but what you really want to know is what we think of it. Here’s our review, broken down feature by feature so you can easily see the ones that matter the most to you.

Idle Search: By far, the coolest and most useful thing on the Helio Ocean is its ability to search right off the idle homescreen. Like Spotlight on a Mac, it can search through multiple things, namely, your contact list, or any of the websites the Ocean supports: Yahoo, Google, Google Maps (using the phone’s Java version), Wikipedia, Yelp, and Amazon. If Helio is smart, they’ll let the phone do the idle search from a customizable list of websites.

Instant Messaging:The addition of the slide-out keyboard and new IM apps is fantastic, but we’re bummed by not being able to have more than one AIM account online simultaneously. You can do MSN, Yahoo and AIM at the same time, but there’s no Google Talk even though there’s a GMail app. Oh, and you can’t turn off the AIM alert sound unless you silence the entire phone.