Hands-on Review: Helio Fin

I've had the Helio Fin in my hot little hands for a little over a week now, and I must say, I'm pretty impressed. Not only is this the smallest and lightest Helio phone yet, it's easily the thinnest flip phone I've ever tested—and it packs in almost every feature of the much bulkier Ocean (save the QWERTY keypad, of course). Nicely done.

Weighing in at about 3.4 ounces, the Fin is one of those super-slim phones (just shy of a half-inch thick) that you don't want to put down. Indeed, I've been walking around the neighborhood with the Fin in my pocket, and I keep forgetting it's there—a problem I certainly didn't have with the 5.6-ounce Ocean or the earlier Kickflip and Hero models.

The outside of the Fin's front flip isn't all that impressive—you just get a little postage-stamp of a display with the time, signal strength and battery life indicators—but open up the Fin and you'll find a gorgeous, 2.25-inch display and a wide, flat keypad. I would've preferred actual keys rather than a flat surface, but I can deal if it means a thinner phone. Along the side of the phone is a pair of volume keys and a proprietary port for charging, syncing and the headset—a bummer, given that you can't swap in your own wired headset (although stereo Bluetooth headsets are supported). I was also disappointed that the slot for microSD memory expansion is hidden behind the battery; it's annoying, but probably a necessary sacrifice to keep the Fin slim and trim.

Anyway, once you open the Fin, you're pretty much looking at the same features and easy-to-use interface as the Ocean, except in a much thinner, lighter package. While the Fin clearly lacks a QWERTY keypad, you get almost all the Ocean's messaging features, including the cool unified contact interface that shows you all your e-mail and IM accounts at a glance. You get out-of-the-box support for AOL, Helio, Earthlink, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail, plus IM access for AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo! Messenger users. There's no MS Exchange support, but you can tap into your POP/IMAP e-mail accounts. Also cool is the Fin's unified contact list, which tells you if any of your contacts are on IM or using Helio's GPS-aided Buddy Beacon.

Multimedia options abound, starting with full-track music downloads and streaming video over Helio's music-and-video storefront; you can also transfer your own media using Helio's Media Mover PC utility. The Fin's music player packs in plenty of options, including an equalizer, shuffle and repeat modes, and groovy visualizations; however, you can't play tunes in the background while you perform other tasks on the phone, and the headset's in-line remote won't let you pause or skip tracks while the Fin's in your pocket. That said, the phone does a good job of pausing your music for calls and then picking up where you left off.

The Fin's Web browser is pretty much a mirror-image of the Ocean's: you can zoom pages and images on the fly, while a mini-map shows you your position relative to the rest of the page. Web pages are rendered with the help of Google optimization, which makes sense on a standard-sized phone screen like the Fin's (you can switch to full HTML mode, although page rendering tends to get jumbled). Helio's Fin browser might not be up to the level of Apple's mobile Safari or the Nokia Web browser, but it's still impressive (and I'm told Opera Mini works on the Fin as well).

New on the Fin (and on the Ocean as well) is Garmin's mobile GPS app, which gives you voiced turn-by-turn directions to specified addresses, or you can search for "points of interest" such as restaurants, bars, ATMs, and gas stations. In my tests, the Fin managed to pinpoint my location within about 30 seconds, and while the app was sometimes slow to catch up with my current position, I managed to get where I was going with a minimum of fuss. Unfortunately, Garmin GPS on the Fin costs a pricey $3/day, and there's no monthly plan at the moment (for example, Verizon Wireless has a $10/month plan for VZ Navigator). The Fin's other cool (and luckily free) GPS app is the Buddy Beacon, an older Helio app that gives you the real-time location of your fellow Helio Buddy Beacon pals.

And yes, the Fin does voice calls—quite well, in fact. You get voice commands, three-way calling and a loud speakerphone, and my test calls sounded loud and clear (I managed to wring close to three hours of talk time from the phone—not bad). Finally, let's not forget the Fin's three-megapixel camera, which takes impressively sharp snapshots for a cell phone; the Java-powered HelioUP app lets you post your pictures to online albums or your MySpace profile, tagged with GPS info if you like.

Overall, I'd say the Fin ($175 with a new service contract) is neck-and-neck with the Ocean as my favorite Helio phone yet. No, you don't get the Ocean's QWERTY messaging or Exchange support, but you get pretty much everything else, in a whisper-thin package. I'm holding off calling the Fin my favorite North American flip phone for now—I still need to take a closer look at Motorola's new RAZR2—but it's certainly a contender.