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Helio Ocean: missing features

Here are features the Ocean is missing (imho, of course)

First an update on what i’ve discovered: it is in fact possible to use the helio menus while the phone is closed, you just have to hold down on the menu button. I guess this is protection against it being pressed while in your pocket. Cool! And now….

1. Idle screen search need to be able to set search defaults. The ocean searches yahoo by default, which is wrong given that google is better. Let me correct your mistake, helio. :-) Waiting for a search to complete just to switch sucks.

2. Give me control over alert sounds. I shouldn’t have to put the entire phone into silent mode just to turn off AIM alerts. Also, can we get rid of the stupid AIM sound? That sound annoyed me on my desktop and it continues to annoy me. How about an unobtrusive click or micro-ping instead of that horrid badly recorded sound we all know and hate.

3. Let me bookmark web pages without going through the stupid google proxy. Some webpages are designed for mobile, there is no reason to put them through the mobile proxy again. That probably only slows things down.

4. I need one shortcut key to get into text messaging mode. Why would you dedicate a button to voice memo (rarely used) over one for starting a message (always used). Granted the idle search bit makes it more comfortable to find the person first, and then write the message, but sometimes i just want to start writing (old habits…like if I’m sending queries to GOOG or 4INFO).

5. Let me customize what goes on the main menu. Although it is very well designed (only 9 choices, spatially spread so that you can remember which direction to press for which one), there is really no need for the Games entry for example, or the Apps entry which has 2 apps, only one of which I use. Why not let me assign the keys so I can launch Goog Maps as if it was a real feature of the phone (see iPhone for how to do this right), rather than navigating through 3 levels to get there. Also I’m not going to pay $5 to play your games, so why don’t we get that out of the way and remove that menu entry :-)

6. The shortcut key at the top of the phone (for accessing alerts) is so far away it is uncomfortable to use. Instead you should replace the useless shortcut key on the side (voice memo) with a programmable one that can access any of the phone’s features with one click.

7. One key internet on/off. Ok here’s the deal–sometimes when I’m by a real computer with real wifi access, I have no need for the internet phone. I don’t want to get all my yahoo mail in duplicate, nor get the annoying AIM alerts. Let me turn it ALL off (no messengers, no push email) and when I’m about to leave on the road let me turn it all back on, with one click. To simulate this behavior currently requires to manually go to every account and sign it out, and for email you have to somehow temporarily disable it which I’m not even sure is possible.

8. The phone has no indication of being on. It freaked me out at first that the screen would go completely blank when the phone was closed. I guess it’s just saving energy, but not even having a small LED that shows that the phone is on means you can’t tell a closed phone from one whose battery has gone dead. That’s no good, because I have it sitting out on my desk and if it’s dead and I’m not receiving calls, I won’t even know about it :-(

9. The Ocean has pretty good detection for phone numbers in sms messages and emails. However when you’re browsing the web the phone numbers are not picked up. Please fix the web browser to discover phone numbers as sometimes i’m doing my local search online and I want to call a number I found on the webpage.

10. If I find a cool webpage sometimes I want to share the link with a friend. Let me copy/paste or simply say ’send a link to your friend’ so I can send the url to a contact via any preferred means.

11. *No HTML Email* ?? I don’t get it…why would you strip links from my email? Why can’t I just click them and use the browser to open them? Is this cruel and unusual punishment?

[Update] I emailed Helio talk AT helio.com to tell them about my blogposts. An actual human responded just a couple hours later. They may not have the perfect phone but if they continue this way with their support service they will certainly be the most human phone company ever! The email follows:

Hey Yan,
Thanks for the good the bad and the ugly around Ocean. I took a quick
look and thought to send this on to our media, marketing and product
teams for their consideration.

your suggestions are idiotic. the device was designed the way it was designed. if you don’t like it, get something else. why not address more important issues, like why aim doesn’t WORK, instead of the sounds it makes? geez. picky much?

Hello my angry friend. Keep in mind that if I really didn\’t care I wouldn\’t have taken the time to blog about this. The reason I have is because I think the Ocean is a great product. But for a great product to become an awesome one, it needs suggestions from its users. The Helio folks have done an awesome job, but let\’s face it, come june they are going to have an uphill battle against the iPhone. Now I realize not every device can address everyone\’s needs, but there are some usability issues with the Ocean that I\’d like to see addressed…

And if you don\’t have anything constructive to add, calling someone idiotic hardly seems like a good use of your time.

good info on the problems with the ocean. I like what you said about the apple UI and widgets. Looks like ocean might be moving in that direction.
take a look at this video.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2007/05/17/helio-ocean-review-with-just-blaze/

about 1/2 way through is shows the myspace 2.0 app. its not available for us to download yet. But it looks real good. Way better interface than the web version. Now if we could get some weather and other apps like this it would be great.

Yeah one thing I don’t get is why MySpace…yes everyone has it, but if this device is targeted to the slightly older crowd (as opposed to sidekick, for the teenagers), it seems like it should be integrated with facebook rather than myspace.

Not that I really care, I don’t really use either religiously but at least I maintain my Facebook account. I like that they have Yelp integration, that’s cool too, but yeah everything needs to be a lot more widgetized and unified, cuz the wow factor is ruined by a difference in user experience between each app.

I do like the look of myspace shown in the video you posted. I hope it means they’ll be developing similar apps for true integration with gmap, weather, yelp, and so on.

Great blogpost man, I am behind you all the way. I like the ocean but I wish it had a few things the other phones had mainly the network light that was on the Hero that told me I had signal and that the phone was on. The hero is the only one that has had this feature and it makes me want to stop using the drift and the ocean I have and go right back to the fist one I used and still have which is the hero. Sky if your reading any of this fix this with the next device or this is going to be once customer that is going to another provider. But enough of my crap.

Oh and one more thing, is it me or is H.O.T not even on this phone?

Good points. Here are some of my own:

1. I want to be able to change a setting to stop the phone from locking when I shut the slider.

2. Sometimes the AIM chime rings, but there are no new IMs.

3. Gmail downloads 100 of my newest emails, read or unread. This is utterly useless, as my Gmail account has thousands of emails. It is not based on POP either, since I have POP on Gmail set to only download new msgs from now on.

4. The web browser doesn’t let me log into any websites that require logins.

5. Sometimes the phone locks up when opening a text message or switching from landscape to portrait view.

6. Google maps is great, but Buddy Beacon uses MapQuest — ugh!

7. Keypad is near impossible to use.

Buddy beacon is useless to me as no one I know has a helio. Would be cool if it was carrier independent (any gps phone). Keypad was hard to use on day 1 but I am now as fast on it as I was on my nokia 6820. Placing one spacebar in the middle was a bad idea (should have dedicated ones for each thumb). That would increase typing rate quite a bit.

Re: gmail I believe you can use the special account “recent:yourusername@gmail.com” to get only unread messages. If you share gmail across multiple clients this is the way to go. When I tried to do this on Helio though I believe that outgoing messages via gmail will fail probably because it’s not a valid username for outgoing. Not sure though, didn’t spend too much time on that yet because I’ve been mostly reading not writing email.

I have logged into websites no problem. I’m not sure what the issue is with the particular sites you tried to visit?

[...] Archives « Helio Ocean: missing features [...]

4. slide the phone open and press ‘down’ on the 4 way button. That will take you into the text/email screen. Although I usually prefer to do it through idle screen search -> contact -> new text.

i’m the best , helio….

Excellent points, especially those about additional customization of the menus and buttons. Here are a couple more…

I wish you could set the alarm sound to be different from the rings of incoming calls. Also, it would be nice to set an alarm for an event on a different day (from that of the event), e.g. on the day before in the case of an early morning appt. Changing the date/time of an event shouldn’t cause the end date/time to reset; instead, it should adjust to be the same elapsed time as the original event.

I’ve also become quite perplexed at the Gmail function of the Ocean. First, as another commenter commented, it downloads all my email, regardless of whether I’ve read it or not. This is ridiculous because I end up reading emails on my Ocean that I’ve read on my computer already. Also, when attempting to send photos (to my photo blog mostly) the Gmail doesn’t send on the first try. It fails, and then I must go into the gmail section of the messaging dashboard itself and press send/receive. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s quite annoying.

Also, I’m not sure what the deal with HelioUp is yet, but I can’t figure out how to access it from a computer. This makes it pretty damn useless so far. They indicate a “share” function, but who knows when this will come. I raise this issue because I would like to upload video to my photo blog, or to http://www.vimeo.com, but the larger video size isn’t message-able, so they are pretty much stuck on my phone or on the HelioUP/Album website. Lame.

One final thing that is annoying is (although I knew this getting into it) that when you’re on the verizon network, only voice and messaging works–not data transfer. Unfortunately, I live in Washington, DC and on Verizon is the only carrier that works on the Metro (subway) here. It’s still nice that the voice works, as compared to all the other cell phone companies, but it would be nice if data transfer did as well.

This being said, i’m still enjoying my ocean immensely and will continue to use it.

Yeah every day I discover more and more issues but I still love it and I think it’s probably the best current solution for the problems that it solves. Other issues I have found

1. When sending AIM messages, it makes a sound/buzzes on outgoing messages, but not in YIM. First of all why would you waste the battery of the device by doing this? I know I sent the damn message, I can see it on the screen, no need to tell me what I just did. Incoming message alerts are fine, but also let me configure them because I don’t want that nasty AOL sound on my phone or within a 10 mile radius of me.

2. Occasionally the vibrating alert for outgoing AIM’s becomes long. Instead of the 0.5s burst which is somewhat tolerable (but not fully, see above), I get these nice 2 second vibrations. Is someone trying to drain my battery on purpose?

3. White screen of death. Two times my phone has crashed so that when I browse the web all I get is a white screen. The resolution both times was to get support to walk me through a reset procedure involving entering some codes into the phone. They will try to walk you through a bunch of seemingly useless steps like clearing cookies and caches but the real solution is a hard reset.

ummm just to let you know, for #4, if hold the DOWN button [under the flame] for 2 seconds, it takes you straight to text messaging mode.

I returned my Ocean after 2 days. The interface is bad, period. Try to enter a calandar event from one date to the next. You use the horizontal keyboard for the event entry and you have no calendar to check days, you just have to know the date and it is entered in this format 01/01/07. So now you have to round up an actual calendar to see what’s happening. Then you can’t actually use the number keys on the horizontal keyboard (using the alt key) , you have to use the vertical numbers keyboard in order to make the archaic format entry. That was IT for me. Now I, and veryone else who decide to make use of helio’s generous return policy is waiting and waiting and waiting for a refund check. It is not happening… BE WARNED!!!

I only have 1 thing to say. Actually 2. #1, I started to have a problem with the phone when I used the headset/headphone to listen to music. This same headset also acts as a headset/earpiece when answering calls. The moment I took the headset/earpiece out, my ocean still thought the headset was in. Thus when someone called and I answered the regular way, they couldn’t hear me, I’d have to plug the earpiece back in for them to hear me! This was rediculous! Then evry since, it had done the same thing. Come to find out, 2 hard resets later… the phone STILL acts up when trying to get people to hear me on the other end!! I will say that customer service was very helpful and courteous and is shipping me out a new ocean. They think its a hardware issue and not a network issue. I love texting and checking my emails, GPS,etc. I’d still use the Ocean if they could resolve the static/speaker piece.

#2- There is no selection in the settings that allows you to turn OFF the headset and switch to regular phone so that you can talk into the mouthpiece as normal. In my kickflip, there was an option in the menu to turn off the headset.. incase the phone still thought the headset was in it. The rep told me “I think they made the ocean too quick and put it out to the public too quick before they found if the bells and whistles truly worked! They were trying to compete with the other smart phones out there, especially the iphone. But they’re fixing the gliches”.

Uh huh…

I loved the Ocean overall, but decided that dealing with the beyond incompetent customer “service” was worth eating a $175 early termination fee.

I had to post, even though this blog is old. I’m also eating the $175 early term fee after 5 months because of horrible customer service. Seriously. Worse than Dell, AOL, and T-Mobile combined (That’s saying something, considering I went back to t-mobile). So many bugs. So many problems. Ugh.

Helio started of as a great brand in my mind and they systematically destroyed themselves. I decided not to post another blog because I still respect what they were trying to do, but something along the way went seriously wrong. First, my phone broken and only 3 days past warranty they refused to do anything about it. I’m not paying another $300 for another Ocean. Second, when I was signing up they refused to give me the myspace no-contract offer that I found out about 2 days after I signed up. Again, I let it slide because of my belief in the brand at that time. Time and time again, Helio has chosen inflexibility and robotic thinking over brand building by doing favors. They will be paying for it by a mass exodus when the iphone comes around.