I finally took the opportunity to play around with a Helio Ocean today. I had met with members of that product’s design team before the product was launched, was impressed with their excitement and enthusiasm about all things usability, and interested to see what they had produced.

Ocean is the SUV of the mobile device world: tough, individualistic (well, SUVs haven’t been that for a decade), and it stays strictly on-target with what it needs to do. It’s a nice device, no question about it.

The spring sliding system is superb. It feels solid in the hand, but it’s awfully thick, and I have to wonder how that works those who carry their phone in their jeans pocket. The display rotates depending on the slider open (eg, when the keyboard is open, the diplay switches to landscape mode), which elegantly resolves the usage issues solved by other devices in a more workaround manner.

(See, for example, the LG Voyager — now that is a nice looking phone… on the outside. But two — count ‘em — two full-sized displays, BACK TO BACK. It’s the progeny of an iPhone and a Nokia Communicator that was a Nintendo DS in infancy.)

While I don’t think the Ocean lives up to the hype, it’s a better device than most out there. It will be interesting to see where SK Telecom takes Helio and its novel focus on operator (or MVNO) product design. And what they learn from it.