Blue Knight Sojourn of the Mind

Why am I blogging about a cell phone plan? Well because I am happy with what I received. So who is Helio? Never heard of them?

Helio is a joint venture between Earthlink (heard of them?) and SK Telecom. SK Telecom as per Hoovers is a mobile communication giant in Asia. In South Korea they are the number one communication provider owning 50% of the market share. They also have a presence in China, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia.

In the US they do not have their own service at this time, but instead resell the Sprint service. Sprint has a high speed 3G data network in major cities and is backed up by Verizon network everywhere else.

So what is such a good deal? Well they are running a special now that gives unlimited everything for $99.00 a month. With taxes that is around $120 US. Now I was using my cell phone for work, and no matter what I have tried staying with AT&T without the data plan, watching my minutes, etc. I was always over $120 and almost always approaching $160.00. Now with this service I can use unlimited data and unlimited voice, unlimited picture messaging (see cool pictures on this blog coming soon) and even media on the phone such as videos.

Edited: 2008-02-28

I used the plan for some time now and it is a good service using the Sprint network, the problem that I have which is making me cancel the service is that the phone that I bought, the Helio Ocean is not a true business type phone. The phone features are good, but it is missing basic things like voice commands. While that is not a big deal because they have up to 99 touch numbers it is a bit ancient in the phone technology. The biggest problem I have is with the four other features.

1. Calendar feature on the phone is the worst I have ever seen in my life. It already made me miss one appointment and when using it as a business phone that is not a good thing. The problem with the calendar feature is that when you enter in the calendar it does not display what time you have appointment set up, you actually have to go in to the each appointment to see available time. I schedule a lot of appointments on the road and it caused me a few problems in scheduling something for a time that I thought was open.

2. The Second feature is the ability to Sync Address book (and for that matter Calendar) from the software you are using. For example my old Nokia phone which is now 2 years old can sync against Funambol server, and so can Outlook and Evolution (which is what I use for E-Mail). This phone can not sync against anything accept their own system, Yahoo and AOL. While there is a possibility to sync against Yahoo from outlook using a third party, not all information that I need carries over.

3. The third feature is the contacts itself. You have no sort feature, you only have sort by last name. While this is OK if you are using it for friends and family you try using it with a 280 contact list of all your business contact. Just tonight I was talking to someone and they mentioned a mutual contact but could not remember a name. I had to search through half the address book, until I found the name and then had to go in to it to verify that this was the person that we needed to talk about. A real pain for a phone of this type.

4. The last one, and for me a big one is actually ability to use TO-DO Lists. I use various programs to keep my ToDo’s and sync then together. There are no To-Do’s in the Ocean phone.

With all of these I am actually going to have to drop my service for Helio (Less then 30 days) and get myself an HTC phone with Sprint. Now that Sprint has a $99.00 unlimited plan.