More thoughts on Helio Part duex

So coming up on one year of being an owner of the Helio Ocean, and thought I would add some more thoughts on the Helio experience.

The phone:
The Helio Ocean was the cool toy, and still gets ohs from technophiles everywhere I go, and other than the relative thickness of the device it still looks and feels cool. The dual slider is just intrinsically interesting and I struggle to not play with it for fear of wearing it out (more on that later). The buttons all still work, and still feel as tactile as the day I bought the phone. The only concern I have for the phone is the occasional reboot on closing the device that makes me think that the mechanical contact is somehow a wear piece. Other than that I find the features I expect to work, work well all the time. I use my phone for mobile information, texting, directions (I am directionally challenged so I love Google maps with gps), and last but not least taking pictures.

The software:
This has not really been updated since I received it has held up well, though I do long for the old version of Buddy Beacon as the new one is too cumbersome to really be cool. Using opera mini has mad the web very usable on the tiny screen, and other than Facebook not working pretty much at all, I have had very little trouble doing reasonable things on the internet. I am sure if I hated myself I could even blog on the little bugger. I am still annoyed by the data appearing to come out of Norway, and as everything switches to Geolocation this may become more of a problem, but until then it seems ok for light surfing of low dynamic media sites ala slashdot.org or The Register if you like to read the news after the slashdotters have taken down the servers hosting whatever was interesting enough to be posted about in the first place.

The youtube app, is really a novelty and I cannot decide if that is a complement or not. It seems nice in theory, and I really have streamed lots of video on it I just cannot bring myself to say that I couldn't live without it. I suppose that has always been youtube's problem though so in a way the app to me is just as good as the actual site, which is to say, eh. I guess I would have to try and live with the iPhone and its lack of such a thing to see if it was a killer app, but I know that not having Pandora internet radio on the darn phone is very sad indeed. I am willing to bet that my ocean has plenty enough processing power to run that app if any of the Motorola phones can run it, and I know the network can handle it.

Google maps. I don't even know where to begin with how many times this app has prevented a fight while driving, or gotten me somewhere when I strayed (accidentally) from the directions. I went to a friends wedding in San Fransisco (Lafayette but close enough) and we had written down some directions to get to their house, well we missed a turn and ended up damn near in Oakland and we would have been very late to their home had I not had my phone and great data coverage. I have helped strangers find places that I have never heard of in my own city, much to their amusement, and really have never had a single complaint about this feature except when there is no data coverage. I have recently noticed that the directions now tell me which side of the street my destination is on, which may the best improvement to the software on the phone ever.

The music player works about as well as can be expected, I have no real complaints about how the music player functions, mostly I complain about how it limits you from doing anything else, unless you want to browse the internet using the near worthless Helio browser. I bought a pair of Motorola S9 wireless Bluetooth headphones to listen to music on, and was impressed by the features and limitations of them. In short I am underwhelmed, but they work well in my house for other things.

The Camera software has an rather odd habit of forgetting my resolution settings (I am guessing it has to do with changing the slide state of the phone) the camera works well. What does not work so well is sending pictures, as the damn engineers didn't make it so you could send pictures that are on external storage. In short that is the dumbest thing I have ever encountered, it makes having external storage virtually useless and should be fixed on all Helio phones as soon as Helio is done being digested by Virgin.

Games are not worth your time, if this is a make or break feature for you move along, nothing to see here. Theoretically any Java app will work, but given the almost 6 months it took me to get into the damn developers program I can only imagine why not one is developing for this phone. That and some other phones I am sure you have heard of are stealing all the limelight probably have something to do with it.

Finally other software of note, there is a stopwatch that I find useful, a calculator that does what it needs to, and a less then impressive unit converter. I may be the only one on planet earth that uses the unit converter constantly, but ever since my cheap Samsung x495 that had the best unit converter ever, I have not been satisfied by poor implementations of this feature.

Hardware:
I still find the hardware of the Ocean to be good, and interesting even in the post iPhone age. The dual slider is still just inherently interesting, and the snap close feels satisfying. The buttons all give good enough feedback to let you know you pressed something, and the device has taken its lumps well. The matte finish feels good in the hand and not cheap, or slippery, and the damage it takes from falls it not terribly noticeable. My only complaint is the girth of this sucker. It is kind of huge, and heavy in my coat pocket.

Coverage:
Without coverage you are SOL and hard, this phone may as well be a brick and the software is all but useless. In my home I have a very hard time making and receiving calls because on the coverage map I am in a trough. The nearest tower to me is blocked from line of site by a large hill and as such coverage sucks. To be fair, ATT has just as poor of coverage in my home, but they are less likely to drop calls. I was interested in the Sprint Airave but because they want to tie it to a Sprint line of service and I get service from a MNVO that operates on their network, this was a no go.


Final thoughts:
In all I am still mostly satisfied with the phone and the services that are offered for what we are paying, and I can hardly imagine how I got along without the data packages before. I would say that I could very likely get away with a 5gb data cap on my phone, given that you cannot tether and web pages are painfully slow loading through opera, in fact the only way you could reasonably rack up data usage is to use the youtube app, and the novelty of that fades relatively quickly. At the half way mark on our contract I can honestly say that unless Helio does some serious innovation we will be moving back onto one of the other carriers when the opportunity comes.

Motorloa S9 Bluetooth Headphones

I bought a pair of Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headphones to listen to music on my Helio and am more than a little sad about the limitations of these headphones. The fit is pretty snug on my average sized head, and I am not a huge fan of the way they fit into my ears but when they are working it is pretty awesome to not have wires tangles all around me.

The good:
Once they are paired the connection is solid indoors and sound is very nice on both music and calls. The buttons on the device are responsive (once you finally get the layout of the buttons figured out) and very useful for navigating tracks on a playlist, as well as taking calls. Indoors the distance is as good as other hands free devices I own and I can set my phone in the middle of the house and walk the majority of that level of the floor with very nice connectivity. Also the battery life is pretty amazing, I can play between 6 and 10 hours on a single charge (most of a week of commutes for me).

The bad:
I am really not sure where the blame lies for this, but unless the headphones and phone are damn near touching I get dropped audio outdoors. Indoors is fine, outdoors crap. I like to keep listening to music as I walk from the bus into work, and it literally cannot happen. As soon as I step off the bus, I get several seconds of dropped audio, and it happens several times a minute while outdoors. Step inside a building and the connection will not drop again. I need to find someone else with a phone that supports the AD2P Bluetooth profile to test on their phone, but I cannot recommend the Helio Ocean as a running companion with the Motorola S9 Headphones. I have heard from others that work outdoors that have Motorola phones that they have never had any such problems, but that is very unscientific, and I have not been able to reproduce.

Other cons include the very unconformable fit of the headphones, even on an average sized head they squeeze and the style of ear buds leaves my ears sore after a several minutes of use. The final con for me is the Repairing has to be forced. My cheapo Bluetooth headset auto repairs when I am in range, and I rarely think twice about it. The S9 requires a manual repairing every time. Every single time, which can be really crappy.

In short I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, but maybe your luck will be better.

Ocean 2, damn you Helio

I am a fan of new phones as much as the next guy, but I am less than thrilled that Helio appears to readying a new Helio Ocean. Seriously guys, I have a contract until 2009, and I am not sure if your company is going to last that long. Besides hemorrhaging cash, I have been trying to get into the developers program for over 2 months now. I have signed an NDA and still cannot get any thing vaguely resembling a response from the damn company. If you don't want anyone to like or have an interest in you this is a great way to make that happen. To be fair a good deal of the lag was on my end. Maybe half of it, but still the length of time required to get you some paperwork, (signed paperwork no less) should not be the major hindrance to getting some fing software developed.

Lets review, in downtown Seattle I get some God Damn fast internet. Seriously fast for a phone, so fast it is a little sick. My battery life is fing solid, I can stream 2 hrs of youtube and still go all day on my battery so el Jobso's inability to launch iPhone with 3g is more his own retarded infatuation with electronics too tiny for natural use (ala MBA, and the Nano, and someday the Pico). I bet at the cost of a Millimeter, and a li-poly battery the 3g iPhone would probably be the phone I own right now.

More Thonghts on Helio

Having had the Helio Ocean for 3 months now I thought I would add some additional thoughts.

The all you can eat data is still gravy, and as long as I stay in the populated sections of the world the data is cash, stray off the beaten path say into a house and your cell calls might as well be placed in a tin can full of shit, and data rate plummets. On the bus along the freeway corridor YouTube moves data so fast, I almost never have to buffer in the middle of a video. That is great, and I really like being able to watch video at full speed; even if the quality is a little iffy.

I do have a gripe though. For some reason that I am sure makes sense to like three people in the world the data traffic is routed through Norway. Yeah, Norway. So when I load Myspace through a web browser I get the Norwegian language site. Yes there is a client for myspace on the Ocean, but because there are some things in messaging that cannot be done with the Myspace client like forward some things require you to use a web browser. I am not sure how is to blame for this though as there is a setting in my profile that says I want USA English and I even tried to change the display language in Myspace manually but in Opera Mini the site continued to load in Norwegian. I had a remedy, but it made life suck big time. I run a proxy on my website for such occasions as this and when my wife needs to check NCAA bracket stuff from work and those sites are blocked. The net effect of loading slow web pages like myspace through a mini browser on a mobile phone routed through Norway on a proxy that is hosted in England, and then get all the way back to me here is the bonny US of A is 20-90 second page loads.

So Helio do your customers a favor and stop routing through Norway. That is really fing stupid.

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.

Helio Wireless Here I come

So Helio Wireless went ahead and removed the road block preventing me from switching to their service this January when the old T-slowmobile contract expires here in January, Helio now offers Family Plans.

I am not sure if this was a soft launch or what as I don't recall anyone mentioning it anywhere, but I am excited none the less. For about $20/mo more than I pay now I can have the same minutes and 2 phones with data access. To add data access to both phones would be at least $30 per line per month and it would be the slow speed that T-mobile has to offer.

For that family member that talks too much there is always the $99/mo unlimited package. It won't be included into your family plan, but at least they can yak as long as their lungs and battery hold out with out breaking he bank.