Helio today introduced the Helio Ocean, the world's first dual-slider combining a traditional numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY keyboard in a single device.

Having a flowing minimalist face and a soft-touch surface, the Ocean slides vertically to reveal a traditional alphanumeric keypad for making calls, sending quick texts or surfing the web, and horizontally to reveal a separate full QWERTY keyboard suitable for emails or texts, web searches and full screen landscape viewing of images and video.

The Helio Ocean sports a huge, 2.4-inch, 260K-color high-resolution QVGA display viewable in both portrait or landscape modes, external stereo speakers, a 2.0-megapixel camera with digital zoom and flash for photos and over two hours of continuous video recording, Bluetooth for wireless voice and stereo Bluetooth for untethered music and videos, 200 MB internal memory expandable via microSD to over 2 GB, and USB Mass Storage Mode for drag-and-drop sideloading of content. Ocean supports an array of audio and video formats including MP3, AAC and WMA audio, and MPEG4 and H.264 video, all delivered over a nationwide high speed 3G network.

The Ocean also carries a special chip designed to optimize music playback for an estimated 15 hours of continuous audio, has fast sync speeds and support for both subscription and individually purchased music. The Ocean even allows users to browse the Web or their music library without interrupting music playback. Whether listening to tracks downloaded over-the-air from Helio Music, playing 3D or multiplayer games, taking pictures on the go and posting them to MySpace, or utilizing built-in GPS technology for Google Maps for mobile or Buddy Beacon, Ocean keeps Helio members in touch with their friends better than ever before.

Combining email, text messages, picture messages and Instant Messages in a single messaging hub, the Ocean's integrated messaging dashboard includes out-of-the-box access to Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, MSN Hotmail, Gmail, Helio Mail, and EarthLink email, as well as the ability to add additional IMAP / POP3 email accounts.

Incorporating Instant Messaging access through Yahoo! Messenger, AOL's AIM Service and Windows Live Messenger, the Ocean's Contact list also syncs with Yahoo!, AOL and Helio Mail address books and incorporates live "presence detection." With presence detection, users can instantly see which IM service their friends are logged into, so they can start typing a name from Ocean's idle screen and the Helio Smart Dialer searches the address book and pulls up full contact information, complete with icons to show if a person is logged in to Yahoo! Messenger, AIM or Windows Live Messenger. Even Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync is available for wirelessly synchronization with Microsoft Office Outlook email, calendar and contacts from a corporate Exchange Server.

With the Ocean, there's no need to open a search box. Just begin typing on the QWERTY keyboard from the idle screen and the device automatically switches into search mode. Ocean has a built-in HTML browser, so users can visit WAP sites or surf any Web site on the Internet. The Ocean's Web browser also lets users view and save Web images to their device and offers features like "mini map" and "page optimize."

The Ocean's 2.0-megapixel camera will take advantage of Helio UP, which lets users take a picture with their device, tag it with metadata including a title, description, keywords and location information and upload it directly to Helio Album, Helio's photo service. Helio UP is GPS-enabled, giving users the option of attaching their GPS coordinates to their photos.

The Helio Ocean is planned for launch in Spring of 2007 at a suggested retail price of $295.