Helio by Virgin Mobile Ocean 2 Cell Phone: Electronics Review

When I got my tax return a few months ago, I decided that one of the things I would definitely purchase with the money was a new cell phone. My T-Mobile Sidekick was almost 2 years old, and it was time for a new phone with all the latest and greatest features. I wanted a cool phone, but I did not want to pay a lot of money for the monthly service. I like to text message and access Facebook from my phone, so messaging and data plans were a month. After a lot of research, I decided to go with a small cell phone company named Helio. Helio has been around for a few years, and they were recently acquired by Virgin Mobile to offer "postpaid" phone plans instead of prepaid ones. Helio by Virgin Mobile offered me a plan with unlimited data, texting, night and weekend minutes and 300 peak minutes per month for just $65. This was significantly lower than most of the bigger phone companies, so I decided to sign up with Helio and get their newest phone: the Ocean 2.

The Ocean 2 is the most expensive phone from Helio by Virgin Mobile at $149 when you sign a 2-year service agreement. The Ocean 2 is a "dual-slider" phone, meaning that it slides in two directions to reveal either a numeric keypad or a full QWERTY keyboard. Helio by Virgin Mobile service runs on the Sprint network, so if you can get a Sprint phone in your area, you should also be able to receive Virgin Mobile telephone service. The Helio Ocean 2 has numerous cool features including a digital camera, a music player that works with subscription music services like Napster, stereo-Bluetooth that allows you to listen to music wirelessly, and a real Opera Mini web browser. The phone is great at messaging, allowing you to send and receive text messages, picture messages, e-mails, and instant messages from services like AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk.

The contact list feature on the Ocean 2 cell phone is robust, with ample room for information like mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, instant messaging user names, and more. The instant messaging feature is integrated with the contact list on the Ocean 2, which means you can see whether or not your friends are online just by looking through your contacts. Although the messaging features of the Helio by Virgin Mobile Ocean 2 cell phone were great, the web browsing definitely left a lot to be desired. I found that the web browser on the Ocean 2 was slow to load and switch between pages, and the data connection to the Sprint network was frequently dropped unless I was standing outside in a good coverage feature.

I had to call Helio by Virgin Mobile customer service a few times, and those were horrible experiences. Their primary call center is located in the Philippines, and many of their customer service representatives seemed to have difficulty with the English language. This is not good when trying to troubleshoot cell phone problems. The horrible customer service combined with the spotty data coverage lead me to get rid of my Ocean 2 cell phone after just 6 weeks of ownership. The phone is cool in concept, but it definitely had bugs and needed to be supported by great customer service, which Helio by Virgin Mobile did not offer. For more information about the Helio Ocean 2 Cell Phone, visit the Virgin Mobile website listed in the resources section of this article.