Should I Helio or not?
Helio buys their air time from Sprint – which means you can look at the same coverage maps and etc. for Sprint. And it’s never going to get super cheap for the same reason. Since Helio is part of EarthLink, I’d imagine Atlanta will be a good spot to get Helio if you want to consider it. The customer service is decent, but nowhere near T-Mobile. I haven’t heard anything good about the financials for Helio or EarthLink in a long time, so solvency is a good concern, but with the EarthLink backing, it’ll take a little bit before they go under compared to other niche cell players. If it’s just the cool phone factor you’re into, don’t overlook the joys of an unlocked phone from overseas or some such. T-Mobile is one of the few providers you can use it with. I looked into Helio for a little bit, but I decided against it. Mostly because they were pushing their MySpace integration hard at the time and it made me feel I was “not the target market”.
I’m in the Phoenix metro, the wife and I bought matching Helio Drifts (she got the white one, I got the black one) about a year ago. Personally, I’m fine with the service. When we opened our account, they ported my number from another carrier with minimal hassle. Beyond that, there’s been no mystery charges on our bill, no inexplicable outages of service, and they’ve been pretty cool about a couple of times when we couldn’t pay the bill exactly on time. Gucky is correct, they piggyback off of other carriers, so unless you live somewhere completely unaccessible, you’ll be fine, service-wise. The phones certainly aren’t geared for business users, but if you just need a personal phone with some decent functions, I’d recommend them.
