Virgin Mobile USA, a wireless entertainment service and cellular telephone company that is a joint-venture between Virgin Group and Sprint Nextel, has relaunched the Helio with a new face: Helio by Virgin Mobile.

Virgin plans to launch the Shuttle, Virgin Mobile USA’s first handset able to use Helio services such as Buddy Beacon. It is also enhancing Helio’s $80 A La Carte plan which mirror Virgin Mobile USA’s Totally Unlimited prepaid voice plan at $79.99. It will be available for current and future Helio members. Virgin has already transitioned the Helio subscribers to its systems.

Here is MobileWhack’s Top Ten Cell Phones of 2007.

1stApple iPhone Cell Phone
2ndSamsung F700 Cell Phone
3rd Motorola Razr2 V8
4th LG Shine
5th Palm Centro SmartPhone
6th RIM Blackberry 8310 SmartPhone
7th Helio Ocean Phone
8th Samsung BlackJack 2
9th Nokia 95 8GB Version
10thSony Ericsson K810 Cybershot Camera Phone
11thLG Veiwty
12thHTC Shift

1st Samsung - Been quite a amazing this year for them, answered all of their competitors moves in every sector not just phones.
2nd Apple - 5 million iphones in 6 months, enough said.
3rd Blackberry
4th Nokia
5th LG
6th Sony
7th HTC a bit of a surpise, these people are small outfit from Hungary lol amazing.
8th Motorola
9th Palm
10th Meizu rip offs in China

The gesture confuses us a bit here in Mobilewhack, but we guess Helio, Samsung and SK Telecom have their reasons for doing so. The new Helio Mysto soft-launched in the United States last December 21. It uses the Korean language. In the United States.

A conjecture would be they wanted to test its performance in the market but the development of the English-language version has been delayed. What the reason is exactly, we may never know. But worry not, English-speaking friends, the earliest release of the English-language Helio Mysto would be available in the Helio stores located in Santa Monica and New York City on the 26th. Full launch will be late January 2008.

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Helio’s Ocean is making more waves. This time around, the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) will unleash a YouTube application for mobile phones. One of the key features missing in the iPhone’s YouTube application is the ability to login using your credentials and view your own videos or leave comments. With the Helio application, you can do that and more. In fact, the Ocean lets you not only capture video but upload it to YouTube directly.

You can also geotag your videos, letting viewers know where the video was taken. Helio is owned by SKT and EarthLink.

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With its partnership with Samsung, Helio has announced another very hot addition to their suite of 3G handsets. The new Samsung Fin is a 11.4mm thick clamshell phone that packs in all sorts of great features. There is a 3 megapixel camera that works in conjunction with the HelioUp application and the Fin’s built-in GPS to upload geo-tagged photos to the Flickr.com photo website. HelioUP can also upload video clips shot with the camera to YouTube.

The Fin is also suitable for music lovers because of its Bluetooth wireless stereo headphone support and a microSD memory card slot that supports 4GB cards. And like the Helio Ocean, the Fin supports Helio’s all-in-one messaging application for quick, unified access to email, text messages, and IM sessions. And, of course, the Fin support Helio’s tight MySpace integration.

A new feature for the phone is the Garmin Mobile navigation application, which will provide verbal turn-by-turn directions to Fin users for a $2.99/day activation fee. The GPS system can also be used by the included Google Maps and Helio Buddy Beacon applications, which cost nothing to use.

The blue-black colored Helio Fin is available online and at Helio retail locations for $175, after a $50 rebate.

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QWERTY keyboards are on the rise, and slide phones seem like a thing of the past. Helio recently announced, however, the first dual-slide Helio Ocean phone. Slide one; a classic slide phone with numeric keypad. Then slide two; a full QWERTY keyboard. The Helio Ocean phone (if I should call it that, I might get eaten by a whale) includes Instant Messages, text messages, picture messages and emails from all the major portals, ISPs and even corporate Exchange servers, in one location. Also, over-the-air music downloads, video-on-demand, a high-resolution camera, an HTML browser, MySpace on Helio, GPS-enabled Google Maps for mobile, and Buddy Beacon.

Unlike the Sidekick, with the Helio Ocean, you can make calls, with out the feeling of holding a cinder block up to your face. It includes a 2.4-inch, 260K color high-resolution QVGA display, which you can view portrait; slide one, or landscape; slide two. External stereo speakers, a 2.0MP camera, which doubles as a video camera that holds up to 2 hours of video. Integrated messaging means users don’t have to choose between text messages or picture messages, this phone (again, the whale) supposedly has an unlimited inbox.

Surfing and searching the web can be a pain, but with the Helio Ocean, there’s no need to open a search box. Just begin typing on the roomy QWERTY keyboard from the idle screen and the device automatically switches into search mode. With the 2.0MP camera, and the GPS, users have the option of attaching their GPS coordinates to their photos.

The Helio Ocean is planned for launch in Spring of ‘07 at a suggested retail price of $295.

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It’s official - big screens are in, and so are sliders. It seems everyone’s making one these days, and according to the FCC, Pantech is no exception. Their latest phone was spotted on the FTC website with Helio branding.

Not only is the Pantech PN810 a slider, but it’s a dual slider as well. If you’re not quite sure what that means, check out the photo. The phone slides vertically to reveal a traditional phone keypad, and horizontally to reveal a full QWERTY keypad, which makes messaging friends quick and easy. The PN810 also a 2.1-megapixel camera (with flash), EV-DO radio, and Bluetooth capability. It also has nice 260k TFT LCD display. It should be long before the company announces the phone, and it ends up at Helio.

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