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Helio introduces Ocean handset

Press release, March 27; Eric Mah, DIGITIMES Asia

Helio introduced on March 26 its Ocean 3G dual-slider handset, which combines a traditional numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard in a single device.

The Ocean features a traditional alphanumeric keypad to send quick texts or surf the web, and slides open to reveal a horizontal full QWERTY keyboard suitable for writing e-mails or texts, web searches and allows for full screen landscape viewing of images and video, according to Helio.

The Ocean sports a 2.4-inch, 260K color high-resolution QVGA display viewable in both portrait or landscape modes, external stereo speakers, a 2.0-megapixel camera with digital zoom and flash for photos and over two hours of continuous video recording. The handset also has Bluetooth for wireless voice and stereo Bluetooth for untethered music and videos, 200MB internal memory expandable via microSD to over 2GB, and USB mass storage mode for drag-and-drop sideloading of content. Ocean supports an array of audio and video formats including MP3, AAC and WMA audio, and MPEG4 and H.264 video, according to Helio.

The Ocean's integrated messaging dashboard includes out-of-the-box access to most major e-mail services offered on the Internet today, as well as the ability to add additional IMAP/POP3 email accounts. Ocean will also support push mail from Yahoo! and other providers, as well as Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and can wirelessly synchronize Microsoft Office Outlook email, calendar and contacts from a corporate Exchange Server.

The Ocean is planned for launch in spring of 2007 at a suggested retail price of US$295.

The Helio Ocean

The Helio Ocean
Photo: Company