The Helio Ocean offers excellent product design with stellar performance. Slide the phone horizontally, and a full QWERTY keyboard is revealed. Keys are well spaced with raised letters, making them easy to type with. But if you slide the phone vertically instead, a dial pad is exposed. These buttons are very stylish in design but less practical in functionality (it takes practice to make calls without looking).

When closed, the most noticeable feature is the stellar 260K-color 2.4-inch LCD. Orientation of the screen flips when the phone is turned and, in landscape mode, videos look quite impressive and detailed. Due to the tri-level design, the device is a bit thick at 0.86 inches, and it is definitely a heavyweight at 5.61 ounces.

The Ocean has one of the largest telephone books on the market, able to store up to 2500 contacts with each capable of holding six phone numbers, e-mail addresses, MySpace profiles and more. The phone has a remarkably large internal memory (200MB), not including what can be put on a MicroSD card.

Because Helio has traditionally marketed products to teens, nobody will be disappointed by its text messaging abilities. One feature allows you to instantly see which of your friends are online from the home screen, and (assuming they have GPS locators too) there's even a service for locating them. Also on the home screen is a handy search engine. Paired with the built-in GPS locator, it allows you to find restaurants in your area along with links for reviews.

Another impressive aspect to this phone is its 3G network. The Ocean uses EV-DO, so download rates are excellent, which is especially good for downloading music. The onboard music player offers solid performance and can be accessed without opening the phone. You can also use Bluetooth stereo headsets to improve the music experience. Meanwhile, the high-speed network eliminates buffering nightmares when surfing the Internet.

The 2.0-megapixel camera offers many options (self-timer, flash, choice of eight resolutions, and numerous effects) but the picture quality is average at best with colors being washed out. Video quality is not any better. Given all of the multimedia options on this device, it is oddly surprising that the actual phone performs far better than most cell phones. Call quality was excellent on both ends, and the speakerphone performed extremely well. Battery life delivers about 5 hours of talk time and a week of standby. Other features include: voice memo recorder, voice-activated dialing, vibrating ringer, photo ID, and USB mass storage.

Pros: Innovative slider design, QWERTY keyboard, superb call clarity, great text messaging, vibrant LCD, GPS features
Cons: Adequate camera, heavy

Warranty
1 year, limited