Note to Helio – I find it misleading and annoying that you advertise that the Ocean lets you browse the full web when it gives you a crappy experience. Remember your product is your marketing. Put a more care into the software experience and you’ll have a winner! The iPhone tells the story well – great outer look, great inner experience. The Ocean’s many buggy features and inconsistent software look and feel fail to deliver on the promise created by the sexy outer shell.

That’s all for now! P.S. Helio: where’s my firmware upgrade to fix all the wierd inconsistencies?

Ok let’s start off the bat so I don’t sound like a fanboy – the company and its products are not perfect (who is?). But they are very very remarkable. What’s remarkable?

Well, besides the fact that their customer service actually replies within hours by email with a real personal response (not “you have been issued ticket #[random] please wait 48 hours for a reply), they also have a very cool blog. What would you expect on a company blog? Features of their products? Press releases? No!

Helio’s blog contains things ranging from interviews with psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (and psychedelic is an understatement if you have seen his films) to comic book stuff, to interviews with independent filmmakers and musicians. Now this is what every company blog should aspire to be.

Having a company blog about such topics is really exciting, and it is even more exciting when it’s a essentially cell phone company (oh quit it with the “don’t call it a phone”, that’s the one thing I think is a bit silly. What am I supposed to call it when I tell my friends I got a new ____?).

We have come to expect that cell phone companies have pretty much the lowest customer service experience known to man (besides maybe the bankruptcy prone airlines). They don’t care about their customers, the only way they’ll give you anything is if you threaten to quit, and they certainly won’t try to say something interesting on their blogs (if they even have them). For me the overall experience of Helio ownership has transcended the minor problems (say the short battery life in my Ocean). To me, Helio is by and large heading in the right direction to creating a consumer experience with a rich story behind it. That’s the way to create a real product. Good luck guys!

First an update on what i’ve discovered: it is in fact possible to use the helio menus while the phone is closed, you just have to hold down on the menu button. I guess this is protection against it being pressed while in your pocket. Cool! And now….

1. Idle screen search need to be able to set search defaults. The ocean searches yahoo by default, which is wrong given that google is better. Let me correct your mistake, helio. :-) Waiting for a search to complete just to switch sucks.

2. Give me control over alert sounds. I shouldn’t have to put the entire phone into silent mode just to turn off AIM alerts. Also, can we get rid of the stupid AIM sound? That sound annoyed me on my desktop and it continues to annoy me. How about an unobtrusive click or micro-ping instead of that horrid badly recorded sound we all know and hate.

3. Let me bookmark web pages without going through the stupid google proxy. Some webpages are designed for mobile, there is no reason to put them through the mobile proxy again. That probably only slows things down.

4. I need one shortcut key to get into text messaging mode. Why would you dedicate a button to voice memo (rarely used) over one for starting a message (always used). Granted the idle search bit makes it more comfortable to find the person first, and then write the message, but sometimes i just want to start writing (old habits…like if I’m sending queries to GOOG or 4INFO).

5. Let me customize what goes on the main menu. Although it is very well designed (only 9 choices, spatially spread so that you can remember which direction to press for which one), there is really no need for the Games entry for example, or the Apps entry which has 2 apps, only one of which I use. Why not let me assign the keys so I can launch Goog Maps as if it was a real feature of the phone (see iPhone for how to do this right), rather than navigating through 3 levels to get there. Also I’m not going to pay $5 to play your games, so why don’t we get that out of the way and remove that menu entry :-)

6. The shortcut key at the top of the phone (for accessing alerts) is so far away it is uncomfortable to use. Instead you should replace the useless shortcut key on the side (voice memo) with a programmable one that can access any of the phone’s features with one click.

7. One key internet on/off. Ok here’s the deal–sometimes when I’m by a real computer with real wifi access, I have no need for the internet phone. I don’t want to get all my yahoo mail in duplicate, nor get the annoying AIM alerts. Let me turn it ALL off (no messengers, no push email) and when I’m about to leave on the road let me turn it all back on, with one click. To simulate this behavior currently requires to manually go to every account and sign it out, and for email you have to somehow temporarily disable it which I’m not even sure is possible.

8. The phone has no indication of being on. It freaked me out at first that the screen would go completely blank when the phone was closed. I guess it’s just saving energy, but not even having a small LED that shows that the phone is on means you can’t tell a closed phone from one whose battery has gone dead. That’s no good, because I have it sitting out on my desk and if it’s dead and I’m not receiving calls, I won’t even know about it :-(

9. The Ocean has pretty good detection for phone numbers in sms messages and emails. However when you’re browsing the web the phone numbers are not picked up. Please fix the web browser to discover phone numbers as sometimes i’m doing my local search online and I want to call a number I found on the webpage.

10. If I find a cool webpage sometimes I want to share the link with a friend. Let me copy/paste or simply say ‘send a link to your friend’ so I can send the url to a contact via any preferred means.

11. *No HTML Email* ?? I don’t get it…why would you strip links from my email? Why can’t I just click them and use the browser to open them? Is this cruel and unusual punishment?

[Update] I emailed Helio talk AT helio.com to tell them about my blogposts. An actual human responded just a couple hours later. They may not have the perfect phone but if they continue this way with their support service they will certainly be the most human phone company ever! The email follows:

Hey Yan,
Thanks for the good the bad and the ugly around Ocean. I took a quick
look and thought to send this on to our media, marketing and product
teams for their consideration.

The Good:

The sliding keyboard on the ocean is very well designed (slides well, not like the Nokia 6820, my previous phone which felt very mechanical and plasticky). The upper row is a bit hard to type on but overall it’s nice. Having two different slide modes is useful because it lets you transition naturally from vertical to horizontal viewing without clicking through menus.

The idle screen search is a key feature. I can just start typing and it’ll find either the contact (and give me options to call, text, or instant message depending on what info I have for him), or if there is no contact it can go straight to a web search. This is very cool and probably the #1 feature that sets this phone apart. The iPhone won’t really be able to pull this off because they don’t have a keyboard…but we’ll see what tricks they have up their sleeve.

The Bad:

Nothing is truly ‘bad’ about this phone. Even the things that are mildly annoying (like having to open it to work the menu buttons) aren’t terrible.

The Ugly:

The web browser is ugly ugly ugly. UGLY! I mean it works…but it’s just not Safari. This is where iPhone is going to completely dominate Helio unless they truly start thinking about browsing experience. Sure, I can read a webpage, but I am not getting the real web experience show in the iPhone demos. Why isn’t the Ocean giving me a proper page formatted beautifuly with css and proper zooming. It’s zooming feature works by clicks of 10% which shows a UI designed from an engineer’s standpoint instead of Apple’s UI which is designed frome a user’s perspective (I don’t care about percentages as a user, I care about being able to see my content so let me hold a button to zoom in or out smoothly, as necessary).

Some things on the Helio just don’t seem well integrated. For example on iPhone if I want weather I have the weather widget. If I want maps I have the maps widget. These things are well integrated into Apple’s interface. On helio, weather is taken from some website which due to their ugly web browser makes it ugly (though I still get the info, it’s not at my fingertips and cannot be processed with one glance). It’s almost like the windows approach where every app is sort of separate rather than Apple’s unified UI, everything looks and feels the same. This is an area where Helio could use the most improvements, but I don’t know if they’ll pull it off without stealing someone from the Apple team. The menus are well designed, but it’s just that every app functions differently. I mean clearly Gmaps is running on Java, while some other things are native..that is already a bad thing.

Overall I like the phone even though it’s a bit bulkier than I thought it would be. I will probably keep it until the iPhone is mature and past its original bumps (which I am sure it will have). For now I like the fast 3G internet, and hopefully when Apple/Cingular catch up I’ll be switching over to get the full browsing experience. Or maybe Helio will step up to the plate and work a normal webbrowser experience into the Ocean. It remains to be seen :-)

[Update:] It sounds like iPhone is coming out June 11. Technically if I time this correctly I may be able to get my hands on one and play with it in a store. If the typing capabilities are satisfactory I will be returning the Helio (they have a 30 day happiness policy — good), and switching to iPhone. I think the Helio guys have done a tremendous job but until they get the design sensibilities of Apple (everything must function the same), they’ll have an uphill battle on their hands.

[Update 2:] I’ve browsed a couple sites in full HTML mode and let me tell you, if this is how slow 3G is, I think the iPhone browser will be damn near unusable, given that it’s running on the slower EDGE technology. I mean seriously, it took forever and a half to load any normal blog or webpage with some graphics out there. The stripped down webpages Ocean loads by default load quickly, but full html – mad slow. The iPhone video demos make everything look uber quick, but they probably aren’t showing true load times. Can someone try loading nytimes.com in full html on EDGE and tell me if it doesn’t make you want to cry?