Ocean's display is excellent. Oddly, something about the layout of the handset's "display layer" made me think the screen was smaller than it actually is, but at 2.4" in size and a QVGA resolution at 260,000 colors, Ocean's screen is on par with all but the very upper echelon of today's mobile phones.
I really like Helio's user-friendly menus and display fonts, and text, images, and video all rendered bright and crisp on Ocean's screen. Screens rotate very quickly from landscape to portrait when you slide the various layers of the handset open and shut, and the display works quite well for widescreen viewing of media. Both still images and video clips may be used as wallpapers, and the Helio Store offers plenty of downloadable backgrounds for you to spend your money on.
With so much functionality - and so many network-enhanced features - under the hood, I was kind of surprised not to find any sort of home screen shortcut menus or data feeds on Ocean. I'm thinking of Nokia's Series 40/60 Active Standby menus or Windows Mobile's Today menus: at a glance views of your daily calendar, user-definable shortcut menus, or even some kind of always-on status updates relating to MySpace, Helio Buddy Beacon, or other social networking services. Even home screen RSS feeds, weather updates, or other news bytes would be cool ... something like a mini MyYahoo! page.
Helio has said that Ocean represents the near-term future of the MVNO, a platform upon which to build-out new user services. So it certainly stands to reason that the provider will be rolling out new features to Ocean via software and firmware updates over the coming months.
I tested the dual-band CDMA Ocean on Helio's service - which runs on Sprint's network - in the San Francisco Bay Area. The phone generally worked very well for voice calls, and I was able to hear and be heard loud and clear throughout my testing. While you'll likely have the phone in portrait mode (with the dialing layer extended) while holding it to your ear for voice calls, it's worth noting that if you're using ocean in landscape mode and answer an incoming call, handsfree speakerphone mode is automatically activated. Ocean actually has two integrated speakers for stereo audio playback. This is a growing trend on cell phones and frankly it's little more than a gimmick. Music played back over the tiny speakers sounds like music played back over tiny speakers - fine for "in a pinch" sharing, but pretty useless for actually enjoying music (in other words, they're no better or worse than any other phone's built-in stereo speakers).
Bluetooth support includes stereo over Bluetooth via the A2DP profile.† I had no trouble pairing a Bluetooth earpiece with the phone, and voice quality with the earpiece was good. Music played back through wireless stereo headphones also sounded good.
Helio also included a pair of stereo earbuds with in-line mic and a separate 2.5 to 3.5mm headphone adapter in the retail packaging. The included earbuds sounded pretty good (i.e. like your standard pack-in earbuds) and worked well for voice calls with the in-line microphone. For music playback, you'll want to rock the 3.5mm adapter paired with a pair of quality earbuds to get "iPod-esque" sound quality.
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4.7
