Helio Heat Review

The Helio Heat is a slider phone featuring a 1.3 megapixel camera. Other features include:

* touch-sensitive controls
* 136 MB internal memory
* Bluetooth
* Helio Music compatibility
* 2-Inch QVGA display

Infosync reviews the Helio Heat and writes, “we’re happy to report that the Heat has an adequate lens on its 1.3-megapixel camera. Pictures still came out a bit oversaturated, causing some blurriness and overexposure at the edges of details, but overall the pictures were much better on this phone than we’ve seen on recent cameraphones, even those with higher-resolution sensors. Helio’s camera interface is very easy to use, with numbers next to icons indicating which keys map to which features. … Unfortunately, the 136MB of internal memory is all the space you have to work with, divided between pictures and camcorder videos, as well as downloaded content like music and music videos. Since the Samsung SGH-E900 had a microSD slot, we’re surprised this was omitted on the Heat in favor of more internal storage.”

CNET reviews the Helio Heat and writes, “The Heat comes with a 1.3-megapixel camera, which is a step down from the Drift’s 2-megapixel offering, but understandable since the Heat is positioned as a lower-tier model. Camera settings include image resolution (1280×960, 800×600, 640×480, 320×240, 240×240), quality (Super Fine, Fine, Normal), brightness, white balance (auto, daylight, cloudy, incandescent, and fluorescent), lighting (normal, spotlight), color effects, photo frames, a self timer, a flash, up to 9x zoom, and sounds for the shutter and the self-timer (all the sounds can be turned off if desired). As for the video camera settings, you could adjust the frame rate, the white balance, lighting, a mute control, color effects, and brightness. As we mentioned, the Heat comes with only 136MB of internal memory, so there isn’t much room to store a large chunk of photos or videos. The resulting quality of the photos was pretty good, with not a lot of blur and good color saturation. Video quality did not fare so well however, as it was quite choppy and low res.”

MobileBurn reviews the Helio Heat and writes, “The basic functionality of the Samsung’s Heat for Helio was good overall, but appears to come up a bit short in terms of talk time. Samsung claims that the Heat is good for up to 3 hours of talk time or 8 days of standby, which seems perhaps a bit optimistic to us. Browsing the Internet, downloading and listening to music, and general toying around with the device definitely took its toll on the Heat’s battery life. But when it came to audio quality, we had no complaints. We always had great reception and audio quality. The phone’s speakerphone, which was a task just to initiate, definitely left us massively unimpressed. During tests, the speakerphone failed to be little, if any, use from distances more than a foot away. The speakerphone is only of any use if you are listening in on a conversation and not participating at all. The Heat did much better when it came to 3G data access, downloading videos, music, and news quickly and without interruption.”