Helio Drift 3G multimedia slider: Part 3

Our request: Streaming audio from a great provider, like Sirius or XM

Multimedia - Very good

All Web pages accessed through the Drift are adapted by Google's Mobilizer function, which cuts long pages up into reasonable chunks and removes some images for easier loaded on a mobile browser. We like this function, and use it frequently while browsing on our Palm Treo 700P, so it was a welcome feature on the Helio Drift. The New York Times homepage loaded perfectly, and was cut into five pieces, making it easier to read. Navigation wasn't as easy, especially with the problematic four-way button's proximity to the ''back'' key, but pages loaded quickly over Helio's 3G EV-DO network (Sprint's network, actually). For multimedia accessories, the Drift comes with a USB cable and stereo headset, but we would have liked a 3.5mm headphone adapter, and maybe a microSD card, though the phone's internal 100MB is an admirable amount of storage.

Our favorites: Google's Mobilizer is a great filter to manage large, complicated pages

Our request: A 3.5mm adapter so we can use our own headphones

GPS - Good

The Drift has GPS capabilities as well, and Helio pairs these with its Buddy Beacon software and Google Maps for navigation. With Buddy Beacon, you set up a buddy list and the Helio shows you on a map (a Mapquest map, strangely) where your buddies are. We were able to track our friendly Helio representative in California, as long as he had his beacon turned on. It was a cool feature that made us wish we had more friends with the Drift to explore the possibilities (Geocaching, anyone?). Google Maps, on the other hand, is a poor navigational tool, even though we like the satellite images and easy-to-use one-line interface for addresses. Helio has basically taken the standard Google Maps Mobile software and overlaid a GPS tracking dot. The software does a great job giving you directions, but the software does not recognize when you've made a turn; you have to manually click from turn to turn, following your dot on the map. Adding to the frustration, the GPS tracks your movement once every couple of minutes, leaving you unsure of the remaining distance before a turn. Clearly, Helio needs to work more closely with Google to truly integrate its GPS device into its Maps application.

Our favorites: Buddy Beacon is the sort of feature that you could organize a party around.

Our request: Google Maps should track your location better for real turn-by-turn navigation

Odds and Ends

Helio provides two pieces of software to help link your Drift with your PC. PCLinkPro helps synchronize contacts, manage calendars, and handle some media files. It can sync your Outlook address book, but cannot synchronize your calendar. Also, PCLinkPro crashed while synchronizing some Outlook contacts, a problem Helio has acknowledged. Helio Media Mover transfers music and videos to the phone, and though in the past we have had a great experience with Media Mover (which automatically converts your video clips to a format compatible with the Drift), we could not get the program to run with the Drift. We got on the phone with Helio's Media Mover team, installed the software on two separate laptops (both Dell Latitude D420s), and tried using two separate Drift phones, but the software crashed every time. While we're disturbed that we couldn't get Media Mover to work, we haven't heard any reports of similar problems (either on discussion forums or elsewhere), so we're willing to give Helio the benefit of the doubt until we try the software on some other systems.
12/22/2006 11:07:14 PM
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