So, I was recently browsing a Mac centric website, and ran across an ad for Helio (clearly the best places for competitors to advertise, no doubt). The ad read:
http://compare.helio.com/
Here is the comparison chart in its entirety.
Why on GOD's green EARTH, would ANYONE choose an iPhone if all these things are true? Reading the comparison, you'd have to be coo-koo to choose an iPhone over this thing of genius. Well, look at the plans too...
Nice checkout options too... look... expand to 2GB of SD memory for $45 or 1 GB for $30. $30 activation fee (compared to AT&T's $35... not bad). Shipped FedEx 2Day. Neat!
CNET rates the device 8.3 out of 10 (the iPhone only scored an 8.0), which is simply EXCELLENT!
http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/helio-ocean/4505-6454_7-32390958.html
THE BIG QUESTION: HUH?
So... I ask you iPhone enthusiasts and non-iPhone enthusiasts... why hasn't this phone completely blown the iPhone out of the water, turning its media hype into a whirlwind of shame? Why isn't this phone just trampling the iPhone underfoot like a rampaging bull elephant? Is it just missing the "Apple" logo? Helo quite cleverly referred to the iPhone everywhere as the AT&T iPhone (although that's sure not to fool many).
At the end of the day... what's the deal here?
CNET noted iPhone's negatives as: "The Apple iPhone has variable call quality and lacks some basic features found in many cell phones, including stereo Bluetooth support and 3G compatibility. Integrated memory is stingy for an iPod, and you have to sync the iPhone to manage music content."
CNET noted the Helio Ocean's negatives as: "The Helio Ocean is a bulky device with a poorly designed numeric keypad. Streaming video quality was not the best and photo quality was mediocre. It also has not yet implemented the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync application that many mobile professionals would covet."
Where'd Helio even come from, you'd think... why didn't Apple just do a deal wtih them? One analyst, Pam Duffey, a telecom analyst at Visiongain, at some point last year, thought that would be EXACTLY what would happen. March 2006, so, don't be to hard on her:
I have an iPhone, so I'm biased on the face of it, but open minded and almost preternaturally addicted to looking at the opposite side of an opinion to see both sides. I've heard about the Helio Ocean for months and months, and kept comparing it to the iPhone and wondering. The let's go mobile website reveals some specs:
http://www.letsgomobile.org/en/cellular/0981/helioocean/
WHAT SUCKS ABOUT THE HELIO OCEAN
Reviewing Helio's website and looking around the net, we can start
seeing the possibly serious downsides in my book:
VERDICT: WHY I CAN'T BRING MYSELF TO CARE
I'll be honest... I'd love to applaud Helio and their Ocean. I'd love to cheer and shout, and hoot. I'd love to say, "way to GO!" and "Sticking it to the man!" I really would. At the end of the day? At the end of the day, HELIO is just another suped-up version of the same phones I didn't want to use anymore. Why? All the reasons above.
I just want to tap on the screen and have a decent size to navigate through. Give me my 480x320 media browsing and podcast support! I use these things, you know? How many clicks does it take to use this phone every day? 2,000? 3,000? I'll probably stop using the features long before that. Scroll to the top and bottom of an iPhone web page, I'll say it will beat a clicker-phone any day. I liked this review here, called "Why I Won't Buy the Helio Ocean".
I see the Helio as "more, better, different". This is the hallmark of evolutionary change. I see my iPhone as something revolutionary. It is something I ALWAYS find myself picking up, and looking for if misplaced. I've sat in my car for 30 minutes before going in the house, surfing my WiFi connection, knowing that the second I step in the house, I'd have other things to do. For the most part, I'll even browse the web on my iPhone while sitting IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, its so natural. I don't think I'll EVER return to wanting to browse the web on a device with a click-button 4 direction system. The amount of times I've held the iPhone with one hand in landscape or portrait, and wanded my finger to scroll through the page... I can appreciate HTC Touch mimicking the behavior that had audiences clapping furiously in January.
If anything, Apple's little wonder is the true quickening of the singularity in my opinion. For all its quibbles, its on the stage by itself, and competitors are dreading each and every new feature addition it picks up. I thought my iPod was useful and great... but looking back, I hadn't seen anything yet.
~ CB
And then linked to this page:
http://compare.helio.com/
Here is the comparison chart in its entirety.
Why on GOD's green EARTH, would ANYONE choose an iPhone if all these things are true? Reading the comparison, you'd have to be coo-koo to choose an iPhone over this thing of genius. Well, look at the plans too...
$6 device protection program if lost (nothing like that on the iPhone!), $6 TV programming for Comedy Central, Adult Swim, VH1 content and more. Bluetooth Stereo headset at $95. Sweet!
Nice checkout options too... look... expand to 2GB of SD memory for $45 or 1 GB for $30. $30 activation fee (compared to AT&T's $35... not bad). Shipped FedEx 2Day. Neat!
CNET rates the device 8.3 out of 10 (the iPhone only scored an 8.0), which is simply EXCELLENT!
http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/helio-ocean/4505-6454_7-32390958.html
THE BIG QUESTION: HUH?
So... I ask you iPhone enthusiasts and non-iPhone enthusiasts... why hasn't this phone completely blown the iPhone out of the water, turning its media hype into a whirlwind of shame? Why isn't this phone just trampling the iPhone underfoot like a rampaging bull elephant? Is it just missing the "Apple" logo? Helo quite cleverly referred to the iPhone everywhere as the AT&T iPhone (although that's sure not to fool many).
At the end of the day... what's the deal here?
CNET noted iPhone's negatives as: "The Apple iPhone has variable call quality and lacks some basic features found in many cell phones, including stereo Bluetooth support and 3G compatibility. Integrated memory is stingy for an iPod, and you have to sync the iPhone to manage music content."
CNET noted the Helio Ocean's negatives as: "The Helio Ocean is a bulky device with a poorly designed numeric keypad. Streaming video quality was not the best and photo quality was mediocre. It also has not yet implemented the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync application that many mobile professionals would covet."
Where'd Helio even come from, you'd think... why didn't Apple just do a deal wtih them? One analyst, Pam Duffey, a telecom analyst at Visiongain, at some point last year, thought that would be EXACTLY what would happen. March 2006, so, don't be to hard on her:
Sounds like Apple to me! MobileTracker.com wrote her opinion in brief this way:
I have an iPhone, so I'm biased on the face of it, but open minded and almost preternaturally addicted to looking at the opposite side of an opinion to see both sides. I've heard about the Helio Ocean for months and months, and kept comparing it to the iPhone and wondering. The let's go mobile website reveals some specs:
http://www.letsgomobile.org/en/cellular/0981/helioocean/
WHAT SUCKS ABOUT THE HELIO OCEAN
Reviewing Helio's website and looking around the net, we can start
seeing the possibly serious downsides in my book:
- MVNO if you want out early, you'll need to get another Helio phone that does even less. Uses Sprint for voice and Verizon for data, but can change these things and manage them as business needs see fit (the recent YouTube cur-fuffle was somewhat telling).
- Battery - With 3G, etc, etc... the talk time is only 5 hours vs iPhone's 8 hours. Start browsing the net, and who knows.
- 240x320 screen, much smaller than the iPhone's 480x320
- NOT touchscreen, buttons all the way, baby!
- Default 200MB, whoopee! That's like 40 songs or a 10 minute movie... sweet! NOTE: I heard that its supposedly 512MB (though the spec says otherwise), but in any case, I love how its ambiguous with many of these phones.
- Maxes out at 2GB at a time, even though it features removeable memory
- No WiFi, but unlimited 3G. That counts right? Who needs local networking?
- Nice and thick, like 2 packs of cards glued together and busting the seems in your pants pocket, unless you're slick and dapper, sporting your cargo pants.
- Does NOT sync your calendar OR your contact to Outlook. Only to Helio's website, which you can upload information to in CSV format. Yikes! NO THANKS!
- Still no Flash support. Does YouTube through 3GP, and only recently stopped blocking customers from accessing it after paying up.
- AccuWeather - $3.99/mo. paying FOR THE WEATHER. That's not cool.
- Personal Organizer, Meh - Gizmodo writes "Nobody wants to maintain two different calendars with their schedules on it. There's also no task list, so if you wanted to use this phone as an organizer, it'd be kind of a stretch."
- Browser Zoom, nice try, but its NO iPhone
- Buy music tracks over the air at $1.99 a pop. Nice, huh? No? What's wrong?
- Coverflow? Where for art thou?
- Supports Yahoo Music and a couple of other DRM formats. No iTunes though (understandably).
- Web browser ALWAYS starts in Google "mobilizer" mode, chopping full HTML down to mobile sizes. You can choose "full HTML" but it stays only for the rest of that session. Give that "mobilized" content is the default, it gives you an idea of how inconvenient full-HTML browsing is on the Helio compared to the iPhone. AS shown in this Gizmodo video on YouTube, it looks like Craig's list full-html becomes a nightmare. Imagine telling the browser to jump from control to control, section to section with no screen tapping. Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click... almost there!
- No specific podcast support.
- Ah, yes... NO MAC Sync SUPPORT. (feel free to Bluetooth though)
VERDICT: WHY I CAN'T BRING MYSELF TO CARE
I'll be honest... I'd love to applaud Helio and their Ocean. I'd love to cheer and shout, and hoot. I'd love to say, "way to GO!" and "Sticking it to the man!" I really would. At the end of the day? At the end of the day, HELIO is just another suped-up version of the same phones I didn't want to use anymore. Why? All the reasons above.
I just want to tap on the screen and have a decent size to navigate through. Give me my 480x320 media browsing and podcast support! I use these things, you know? How many clicks does it take to use this phone every day? 2,000? 3,000? I'll probably stop using the features long before that. Scroll to the top and bottom of an iPhone web page, I'll say it will beat a clicker-phone any day. I liked this review here, called "Why I Won't Buy the Helio Ocean".
He added in the comments:
Amen, and amen. Isn't the devil just totally in the details? Perhaps Helio is a cautionary tale of the rumored Apple MVNO. Not exactly where Apple would want to position itself. Not exactly the kind of device Apple believes would "shake up" the industry.
I see the Helio as "more, better, different". This is the hallmark of evolutionary change. I see my iPhone as something revolutionary. It is something I ALWAYS find myself picking up, and looking for if misplaced. I've sat in my car for 30 minutes before going in the house, surfing my WiFi connection, knowing that the second I step in the house, I'd have other things to do. For the most part, I'll even browse the web on my iPhone while sitting IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER, its so natural. I don't think I'll EVER return to wanting to browse the web on a device with a click-button 4 direction system. The amount of times I've held the iPhone with one hand in landscape or portrait, and wanded my finger to scroll through the page... I can appreciate HTC Touch mimicking the behavior that had audiences clapping furiously in January.
If anything, Apple's little wonder is the true quickening of the singularity in my opinion. For all its quibbles, its on the stage by itself, and competitors are dreading each and every new feature addition it picks up. I thought my iPod was useful and great... but looking back, I hadn't seen anything yet.
~ CB
This positively THE BEST IM client I've ever seen on a mobile phone, and I have a hard time reconizing that I'm still in Safari. iPhone interface, great controls, well... well... WELL... thought out interface. Portrait/Landscape... however I want, it just works! I can't imagine the 1.0 Blackberry version of the service even looks half as good.
