Hands-on with the Helio Ocean

They're calling it a Sidekick killer, and after taking the Ocean for a brief spin in a CTIA briefing room, I think they may be right. The new two-way messaging slider is easily Helio's best phone to date, and it gives competitors such as the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 and the LG enV a serious run for their money.

At first glance, the Ocean looks pretty bulky, and it tips the scale at well over five ounces. Still, I liked the phone's oval-shaped design, and the slightly rubberized case felt good to my fingertips. The Ocean slides open with a nice springy motion, either down for the wide, flat numeric keys or to the side for the smaller, dome-shaped QWERTY keys. Typing on the keypad was fairly easy, although the tiny space key was a bit small for my taste, and the top row of QWERTY keys felt uncomfortably close to the side of the phone.

Helio's done a nice job of updating its already ahead-of-the-curve user interface, which automatically switches to landscape mode when the QWERTY keys are open. Especially impressive is its new message interface, which does a fantastic job of grouping your various mail accounts and IM conversations all in one place. The Ocean's contact list keeps the integration theme going with its cool "presence" indicator, which highlights buddies who are signed onto an IM service (including Helio's Buddy Beacon, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger). Tack on support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and Direct Push, and you've got a one of the most robust consumer messaging phones out there (rivaled perhaps by the Palm Treo 680).

Web browsing on the Ocean is a slick experience with its new and improved browser, which boasts full HTML support and a "mini map" that shows your position relative to the rest of the page (a feature that's long been on Nokia's top-notch browser). Also cool is the new real-time zooming tool, which expands or contracts the page anywhere from 50 to 200 percent; in my quick test, page zooming was more or less instantaneous.

Multimedia options abound, including streaming video and music downloads, and you can listen to tunes over the external stereo speakers, a stereo Bluetooth headset, or while using other applications on the phone. I also quite liked the new Helio Up feature, which lets you tag snapshots from the 2-megapixel camera and tack on GPS coordinates; you can even send images to your MySpace profile in a single step (fixing one of my biggest pet peeves with previous Helio handsets, which forced you to compose a separate multimedia message to post MySpace images).

I'm reserving my final judgment until I've spent some serious quality time with the Ocean, but so far I like what I see. Again, the Ocean should arrive in stores later this spring for $295.