Helio Kickflip Review (Part 2)

I got the chance to test out the new Helio Kickflip phone, and here is the second part of my review. You can find Part I of this review in an earlier post. So far I've gone over design and entertainment, let's find out how the camera features work, as well as the Kickflip's shortcomings in the rest of this article.

Keeping the Focus on Fun-ctionality

The Helio Kickflip has a two megapixel camera that can take photos at six different resolutions (up to1600x1200). With a big focus on fun photos, the Kickflip's camera lets you overlay your photos with fun stickers of pirates, birthday balloon frames, or monkeys. Once you're totally bored with stickers and frames, you can still add cool effects to your snapshots like posterize, sepia, solarize or sketch, instead of doing this on third-party applications such as Photoshop. But it's not all fun and games either, the built-in flash—although not that powerful—is better than no flash at all when you're in a dark room, plus you can adjust the brightness, quality, zoom and lighting modes for better pictures. Flickr lovers will love the ability to get up close and personal with macro shots. Continuous shooting allows you to capture those action shots by supporting up to nine frames.

The video camera has most of the features mentioned above, and I had loads of fun recording several videos using the various effect modes. Recording video on sketch mode made my clip look like A-ha's "Take On Me" video. Remember that? The video camera records MPEG-4 movies, and once transferred to your computer, a special software converts them into Quicktime movies automatically so they're ready to be uploaded to the web.

It's Not Perfect

My biggest gripe was the placement of the camera. I ruined a few photos and videos because my big fingers kept blocking the camera. Something needs to happen to the placement of the camera lens on the next version, or people will continue getting clumsy finger shots in their pictures. Sadly, it doesn't have Bluetooth technology, which means no wireless headset. The exposed screen will keep you on edge for fear of getting it all scratched up inside your purse, since a case wasn't included with the handset. I just hope the screen is scratch resistant. One thing I don't understand is why the skimping out on memory. The handset comes with 70MB of internal memory, and if you want additional space, you'll need to purchase a $52 Flash card that only has a capacity of 512MB. For being this big media phone that's supposed to hold music and video, the Kickflip sure needs a bigger memory card. Most websites I tried to visit from the phone's browser didn't work.  I even tried going to several popular sites, and all I got were errors saying they couldn't be displayed in their current format. I did noticed it needed frequent battery charges if you don't want to run out of juice, but then again it was quick to recharge. And the biggest headache was the software. You need Media Mover to upload music and video to your phone, and a different application to upload all your contacts. It would be nice to know you need these applications before hand. A CD was included in the package, but the CD did not contain the software needed to upload or download data to the phone, you need to get it from their website. I found this very confusing.

Overall, once you get over the "little things" you'll find yourself surfing the web in no time. Just so you know they do have a Trade Up program, and MySpace members can get the phone without the two-year service agreement.

The Helio Kickflip has a lot of features that I obviously can't cover here in their entirety, so if you have any questions about it, let me know. I will continue to test it out in the meantime, and plan to keep you updated on any other findings.

Any Kickflip owners out there? Tell me about your experience with the new Helio phones.