Helio Hero ($275)

As Attack of the Show's “gadget guy,” I see a lot of products: sadly most of those products suck. Maybe this is why I'm so goddamn stoked on the Helio Hero; the so-called “MySpace” phone. It's crazy, but I've messed around with a ton of phones, and I expected the Hero to be nothing more than a stupid gimmick; a pathetic attempt by an unknown company to ride the MySpace wave. While the fact remains that the Helio Hero does represent a little known company's attempt to ride a popular wave: MySpace, gimmicks aside, it's a really good phone.

This thing has an enormous 2.2-inch screen, 70MB of built-in memory as well as a MicroSD (TransFlash) slot, a speakerphone, a 2-megapixel camera, and a multimedia player that supports MP3 and MPEG 4. Kudos aside, the Hero lacks Bluetooth support. While I've played with plenty of phones with megapixel cameras, many of them took shitty pictures. The Hero actually takes good pictures; which is good, cause you can upload pictures that you take with the Hero to your MySpace profile while on-the-goA dual-band CDMA phone that operates on the Sprint network, the Helio Hero has support for the company's high-speed EV-DO network, which is a must if you're gonna use it to surf the wireless web, check email, and peruse MySpace while mobile.

Of course, the Hero's claim to fame is that you can use it to manage your MySpace profile while on the go. How does it work?, You fire up the WAP browser and go to a custom MySpace page that's formatted for the small screen. While there, you can do anything you can do from any MySpace page: read your messages, add new friends, upload photos, and approve comments. While the Hero is an EV-DO phone, data transfers were pretty quick. That said; I found myself subject to the relative speed of Sprint's network. In other words, if the signal was weak, things moved slowly.

Ultimately, the Hero is a good phone. It's a pretty solid handheld and the slider form factor is sweet. That said, since it's a text-heavy device, it would be nice they made a model with a full QWERTY keyboard. Anyway, if you're a MySpace junkie, then it's a must have.