HELIO OCEAN 2 (VIRGIN MOBILE)

The Pre Palm Pre?




One of the coolest elements of Palm's highly anticipated Pre has arrived early: Contact synergy comes to the masses in the form of Virgin Mobile's Helio Ocean 2. This new feature merges address books from several different sources to let you c-mail, text, or instant message all of your friends quickly and easily. Synergy on the Ocean doesn't go as far as it does on the Pre, but it's here now, it's inexpensive, and it's a pretty cool device for messaging friends.

There's no getting around the fact that the Ocean is huge. At 5.9 ounces and 4.7 by 2.3 by 0.8 inches (FIWD), this is no slim-and-light handset. The phone opens two ways: You can slide the screen up to get a traditional phone keypad or slide it sideways to get a full QWERTY keyboard. Navigating is done by means of a fou•-way rocker with a trendy optical sensor in the middle. You also get a 2-megapixel camera and 2.6-inch, 320-by-240 LCD. Battery life came in at 6 hours 44 minutes of continuous talk time.


Sure, the Ocean 2 is a fine voice phone, but really, you're not buying a warship like this to talk on—it's all about the messaging. The phone lets you combine all your contacts from a free 100MB Ifelio webmail account, A01., Microsoft Exchange, and Yahoo into one master address book. E-mail and Ilv1 run in the background and aromatically push messages to you as soon as they arrive (except for messages from generic POP/IMAP accounts). The one bump in the road is that the Ocean 2's Web browser is painfully slow. Though it is not as sleek as the upcoming Palm Pre, the Ocean 2 is worth a look for heavy messagers who are willing to jump to Virgin Mobile.—Sascha Segan



PC Magazine April 2009