Helio Ocean

The Helio Ocean is a stylish, feature-packed phone. Its innovative dual-slider design allows for both a standard phone keypad and a full keyboard. Though it lacks Wi-Fi, it offers fast EvDO data access, Bluetooth, built-in GPS, and a great do-it-all message center that combines text, IM, and e-mail. You also get an easy-to-use 2-megapixel camera (with flash) that can record video.

Overall, I'm impressed with this fun phone. The only drawback I found with the $295 Ocean was occasionally fuzzy or hollow-sounding audio in my informal test calls to various numbers. Whether the cause was Sprint or Helio's local service in San Francisco or a hardware limitation in the phone itself, I couldn't say--but calls from my Treo (with AT&T service) to the same numbers generally sounded better.

Another minor issue: Battery life for the Ocean was only fair in our tests, lasting 5.5 hours (we test for a maximum of 10 hours).