Helio Announces The Ocean

With the CTIA Wireless trade show about to get under way, the cell phone news is starting to fly quickly and furiously. The Ocean is a new mobile from upstart cell service Helio, known for bringing over cool phones from overseas vendors.

Most interesting is the phone’s form factor, which features a dual-sliding keypad design. Pull the ‘pad out from the bottom, and you have the traditional set of number keys for making calls. Slide it from the side and you can use the full QWERTY keyboard to text, IM, email, and surf the Web, all while taking advantage of the screen in landscape mode. The phone also has a “presence detection” feature; punch in a friend’s name and the phone will tell you which IM service he/she is logged into (Yahoo!, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger).

The phone is no slouch in the features department, offering a 2-megapixel camera (useful for uploading pics using the service’s mobile version of MySpace), Bluetooth, 200MB of internal memory, and a microSD slot. Helio also claims that the Ocean plays 15 hours of music thanks to a “special chip designed to optimize music playback,” which should help out as you start stocking up on tunes from the service’s music store. The Ocean is due this spring and will cost $295.

Posted in: CellPhones,Helio