Helio is a brand name not many of you might have heard of. I certainly hadn't, until today. And I am excited. Now Helio's doing something different. It's positioning itself as a mobile brand built for young and tech-savvy customers. That's you and me. For starters, Helio has announced two cell phones, the Hero (shown in the image) and the Kickflip. These multimedia handsets should excite 3G users in the United States.

The Hero and the Kickflip inherit a legacy from their high-end cousins in Korea (one of the most advanced 3G markets on this planet). This is topped up with design tastes suited to US customers. What you therefore get is a fashion-savvy hi-tech device. The jet-black Hero is a multimedia loving phone. It's got a 2.2 inch, 262K-color high-resolution QVGA LCD display, industry-leading audio capabilities with full duplex stereo speakers, removable memory, and a 2.0 megapixel camera with digital zoom and flash for capturing pictures and video. Add to this mix, a co-processor chip, which will make you sing and dance to your music and videos.

The funky named Kickflip is pearl-colored, packs the features of the Hero, albeit in a sleek body with an innovative swivel opening that flips to the right or left with the simple nudge of your finger.

Helio's also coming out with some innovative services. There's the MySpace Mobile service which will allow users to network through mail, bulletins, profiles, blogs and photo galleries. You can read more about it at Helio's website.

You need to wait till Spring 2006 to grab all this. Watch this space for breaking news.