Review of Helio and Hero
May 19, 2006 at 8:45 am | In Mobile | 52 CommentsFirst a disclaimer, of sorts. I'm not a paid tech journalist, I'm not a Helio employee, and I'm not Tom Cruise, so I paid full price for the phone and the service. Why do I say this? Because I'm not just reviewing the phone as part of my job. I invested (?) into this, so I need to make it work for me, or I need to send it back withing 30 days under the Happiness Guarantee.
I SO don't fit the demographic for this service. I'm not the young, hip (well maybe), professional that lives for MySpace (but I did create an account). I'm a 43 year old consultant and gadget enthusiast. I travel frequently for my job, so I am very interested in mobile technology.
I also have two high standards that I use for comparison, Apple and Treo 650. Apple excels at user interface, integration, and usability, and Treo 650 excels functionally (for a mobile device).
What's Cool
- H.O.T. (Helio On Top) – This is a free add-on a application (currently Beta) for the phone that displays news headlines on the phone's main screen. The news "channel" choices are a little limited (Yahoo Headlines, Yahoo Business, Yahoo Tech, etc.), there's about 6 or 8 to choose from. At this point, there's no user-definable feeds.
- Streaming Video – I'm pretty impressed with the video capabilities of the phone teamed with the 3G network. Helio has a number of videos that are free to watch (although yesterday I got a message about a free trial expiration). I like RocketBoom, and while newer shows have not been posted, I enjoy watching older ones that I haven't seen.
- Gaming – I'm not a big gamer, but I may become one on my Hero. The graphics are very cool. There are 2 games included, a limited version of a 3-D Pool game, and Lost Sister which is you basic walk-around-slash-goons-pick-up-gems kind of game.
- MP3 Player and Headphones – The phone is packaged with a nice set of stereo headphones. The headphones have an integrated microphone for making calls and a button for answering and ending calls. The button also doubles as a Next Track button while listening to the MP3 player. While the 70MB of onboard memory is great for taking pictures and downloading app and other content, its not sufficient for music. I've ordered a 512MB TransFlash card just for loading music.
What's Not So Cool
- Web Browser – The browser is very limiting as far as sites that can be viewed. The current version of the browswer seems limited to strictly WAP formatted sites. There are a couple of ways around this limitation.
- Create your own WAP portal site – I did this for the sites that I like to visit the most. Its just regular HTML with a special header:<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.0//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
- Use a reformatter like Skweezer, iyhy.com, or Google's mobile optimizer. Instead of trying to type long URLs on my phone, I simply use Skweezer on my computer, paste in the URL I want to access on my phone, have Skweezer do its magic, then copy the long resulting URL into my WAP poral site (Option 1 above).
- Uploading Pics – Uploading pictures to MySpace is a two step process (weird!). First you MMS a pic to a Helio server, then you have an opportunity to post it on MySpace. This seems a bit strange considering how much bragging is going on about how well Helio is integrated with MySpace. I will give them credit for the rest of the MySpace integration, it works well.
- E-Mailing Pics – Some e-mail addresses work, others don't. Customer Service doesn't have a clue about this either. I was told "We have pretty good luck sending to a gmail address". IMHO, this is a feature that should work to any e-mail address. I've personally found that pics can't be mailed to Blogger, 23hq and ScanR. I've had "good luck" so far sending to gmail, Yahoo, and FlickR.
- No SMS E-Mail Address – This is standard mobile phone stuff folks! But you don't have it with Helio (there is a work-around, but I'm not posting it here in fear that the hole will be filled). Any other service gives you an e-mail address that links to SMS. For Verizon, its yourphonenumber@vmail.com, for T-Mobile its yourphonenumber@tmomail.net. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with a Customer Service Rep that couldn't figure out what I was talking about.
- Customer Service – I realize that the service is new, I realize that the reps are new, but does anyone train these people? I know more about this phone in the week that I've had it than any CSR I've talked to, and I've talked to 4 of them. I end up educating them every time. Sky, hire me!
- Manual – Normally I'm a subscriber to the theory of RTFM, but in this case, there are so many details about the phones applications that are missing, that you have to call Customer Service. Unfortunately, they don't know either. Want to know any details about the MP3 player and the options on the screen? Good luck. When you figure it out, let me know.
Camera Testing
I took a number of pictures of the same subject at different resolution settings. Here are the extremes, 1600×1200 and 240×180.
Overall
Is there more bad than good? No. I like the phone and I like the service. Its not for everyone, no service is. Noone can expect a be-all end-all service that has everything for everyone. Sky Dayton has chosen a niche, and filled it well. I hope to see more innovations, improvements, and additional apps for the phone. It is cool.
Sky: If you're looking for a top notch DB Marketer (Unica), you have my number… literally.
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Follow-up Edit 15 JUL 2007:
A few readers have been asking about my more recent experiences with Helio. In one word, “None”.
At the time that I got the Hero, I was traveling frequently, mostly to Richmond Virginia. I had a lot of trouble making and receiving calls pretty much anywhere. The phone would indicate that a call was connected, my party on the other end of the call was there, but I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me. Being an engineer, I tried to diagnose the problem myself as much as I could, by testing in different geographies, times of day, etc. The problem was sporatic, so I deemed the service unreliable after Helio replaced the phone 3 times.
Helio finally deemed me “unfit” for their service, and let me out of the contract with no escape fee. They determined that the area(s) that I used the phone had marginal Sprint service. Of course, I had expained any number of times that the issues with my calls happened pretty much anywhere. This is just another example of poor Helio customer service and their level of knowledge. After all the trouble that I had, I just wanted out of my contract anyway. Bye-bye, Sky!
What am I left with now? A brick that I still carry when I travel, only for the 2MP camera (I don’t carry another camera when I travel on business), and a game that I like to play.
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