Helio Heat (Onyx Black)

(Review) - Helio is an interesting service in that the company operates exclusively on its own platform. As a result, it’s particularly focused on the young demographics, and releases handsets (from Samsung) that are intuitive and very appealing. The company recently announced the Helio Heat in two colors: Onyx Black and Gold, and it goes without saying that these phones look remarkable. The exterior edge of device has the volume up/down button and play/pause buttons for media playback on the left and dedicated camera keys and end/power key on the right edge. We are not too excited about the end/power key location. What’s the point of having a key there? Then again, that was probably the only place Helio could have a key.

You see, the Helio Heat is a slider with a gorgeous 1.99-inch, QVGA 262k color display that’s downright amazing, especially with the excellent interface. Since Helio has incorporated multimedia controls on the face, the only other way to place the End key was on the outer edges. On the front, you will find access to a send key, a back key, 2x soft keys and music playback controls. These keys are tangent. Interestingly, Helio Heat is integrated with Electrostatic Touchpad (i.e. touchsensitive controls), similar to LG’s Chocolate VX8500 from Verizon. Unfortunately, we had a difficult time working with the touchsensitive controls despite altering sensitivity settings. On the bright side, however, at least the phone freezes during calls, so you don’t accidentally slide across the controls. The only way to unfreeze the touchsensitive controls is to open the phone or hit the play/pause key.

Once you slide open the phone, there’s isn’t anything remotely interesting going on. You will have access to alphanumeric keypad for dialing and messaging. The keys were relatively soft, though embedded a little too much into the body for our tastes. On the back is where you will find a 1.3-megapixel camera with flash, lens and a self-portrait mirror. The camera includes resolutions from 1,280x960 and below with the standard image quality settings and configurations. You can also record video with the Helio Heat. Even though the photo quality was great, the video recording could certainly use more work. The video we recorded was pixilated far too much to be worthy of anything. Not to mention, since there’s no microSD storage expansion slot, you will be limited significantly to what you can do. There’s only so much data you can store with 136MB. That’s a major flaw that Helio should’ve paid attention to. In addition, you can edit the photos onboard the phone as well. These include flipping, cropping, resizing, stretching, rotating and swirling (images) and adding effects, fades, overlays and effects to video.

From a features standpoint, the Helio Heat has a great interface with everything organized in circles. There’s also deep integration with MySpace via MySpace Mobile access, built-in GPS technology and Buddy Beacon, which is an application that helps you locate your friends if they are using Helio as well. These services worked well. The Helio Heat is also equipped with Bluetooth technology and EV-DO for broadband-like connection. The basic features, such as an alarm clock and a calendar are available as well.

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