For those that don’t already know, I’m a full blown technophile. I love anything computer or technology related. Whether it be computers, game systems, stereos, etc. In the case of this little blog entry though, I’ll be focusing my nerdines towards cell phones.
As a technophile I have a compulsion to have the latest, greatest thing. When I was in Japan I always had some of the best phone that I could get my hands on. I didn’t ever have the best phone on the market, mainly because I couldn’t quit afford them. Either way, my phone was always light years beyond what was available back home in the states. When I finally settled in on a phone to use here in America, I got an pretty cool LG phone through Verizon Wireless. Sure I could have just used one of my Japanese phones and plugged in a new sim card, but I was really busy, and I already had an ongoing Verizon account. So, I just stuck with that.
My LG phone was pretty cool, it did most of the things that I needed. The things it didn’t do was because the services weren’t available in America. Recently though, I was starting to feel kind of left behind with it. There are newer, much better phones out in America now. Some of them are similar to ones I used in Japan. Alas, I felt the nagging urge to upgrade. I decided to go ahead and get a Japanese model Sony Ericson phone and sign up with T-Moblile.
That didn’t work out though. Through some work thing My fiance got a free phone and service from Helio. So, for obvious reasons, I went with Helio instead. They gave her a Drift but she wanted the shiny new Ocean, so she got the Ocean and I got the Drift. At first I wanted an Ocean too, and I was planning on getting one. After using the Drift though, I think I’m going to stick with it. The only thing that the Ocean has that the Drift doesn’t is a keyboard. To be fair, it is considerably faster too. However is has less customizable options and its big, really big. My Drift is all cute and small.
At first I wasn’t really looking forward to using Helio service. I though it was going to crappy, over hyped, hipster, emo, crap. Well, I was wrong, Helio is equal to if not better than any service provider I’ve ever used, here or abroad. The people that work for them are really friendly and helpful. They have cool proprietary phones, they offer cool little features that nobody else has like GPS integration. And from an art persons point of view, the company just looks cool.
That however isn’t to say that they don’t have they’re faults. PC Link, The software that they provide to sync my phone with my computer doesn’t work. I don’t mean that it’s poorly designed or that it doesn’t have enough features. What I’m mean is that it simply doesn’t work. At first I thought it was just me having the problems, but after doing some research it doesn’t seem to work for more than about 5% of the people who try to use it. I even spent an hour or so on the phone with tech support with no avail. Also, there Internet service has been down twice since I started using them. So they aren’t without they’re flaws
The best thing about being with Helio though is the community support for it. Specifically, all the free games and applications that are available for it. Sure, some are straight up bootlegs and thats not cool. However, most are open source projects. I’ve downloaded Tetris, Pong, 300, Zelda and a whole bunch more. I have Zelda on my phone. How cool is that?
Overall, I’m rather happy using Helio’s service. Hopefully they get they’re act together a bit better in the future.
Tags: cell phones, cellphone, cellular, comunication, drift, Helio, phone, phones, samsung, technology
