Thursday, February 14, 2008

Thoughts on Helio

So my wife and I have mad the jump to Helio and both are loving the experience. I choose the Ocean for the full features and she chose the Fin because it is the only flip phone (and its blue). The features are absolutely awesome, data speeds are impressive and the capabilities make my iPhone owning friends a little jealous. We use them so much that many days we find the bottom of the battery, (neither of us has run the battery our, but both of us have gotten the low battery warning). In the first few days I owned the Ocean I streamed 80mb of YouTube video. The lagginess was not much worse than I experience on old P4's streaming YouTube, the picture fuzzes sometimes, but the audio rarely skipped.

Most of what I have to say I am sure is covered elsewhere and probably better written, but I just had to gush I love this phone.

I am looking to get started in the developers program, but they are kind of secretive about it, NDA and disclosure of the type of programs you are interested in developing. I was really surprised how closed off they are, but then I realized that Google, (the best damn internet/technology company ever) spoils me constantly with their openness credo.

Anyhow the whole point of this post was to point out the site Heliocity.net has several guides that made me significantly less annoyed with the Ocean and Fin that we own. One of the guides gave pretty good instructions on how to create ringtones from mp3's using free software, and get them on your phone. Part of the guide was windows xp I tried on vista business and no go). Do the mp3 to MMF conversion, you get so much longer ringtones and they actually work.

Another really nice site I found is https://www.peetre001.com/ (remember to type the s in https). Go with your Helio busted ass web browser if for nothing other than to download Opera 4 mini, it is such an improvement over Helio's browser. Not perfect, but better.