Helio fans have had enough torment for the last year. First, there were rumors that the company was going to go completely bankrupt. Then there were mixed feelings about the MVNO being acquired by another MVNO – Virgin Mobile. To top it all off, die-hard Ocean lovers kept getting their hopes and dreams shot down every couple of months with news of the Ocean 2, only to have it never arrive. Well, we hate to put you on that rollercoaster of emotions but a pretty solid source put word out that Helio is planning to put out the Ocean 2 as early as next month. But with the iPhone, Bold, Curve 8900, Storm, Palm Pre, G1, and HTC Fuze, how well will the Ocean 2 keep up? Not many even know about the original Ocean let alone rumors of a second iteration coming out. As much as we loved the first Ocean, we’re afraid this might be too little too late – even for some of the biggest Helio fans. No word on pricing as of yet, but with the original Ocean’s $299, don’t expect anything too tempting.

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So, we knew Helio cut 100 jobs yesterday to try and focus more on their top markets, which makes sense. What we didn’t know, however, is how this came about and what this meant for Helio as a company. We’ve obtained a memo from Sky Dayton, CEO of Helio, and you can take a look at it after the jump. It seems that Helio is doing quite well with July being their highest record sales month, and now August beating July. And why shouldn’t it? We love Helio, and they offer great innovative products and services. Just do us a couple favors Helio; fix the lag in the Ocean,and even the Fin a little, keep on launching new, exclusive devices, and work on your customer service. Then, "they can’t tell you nothinnn’. La-la-la-la."

—— Forwarded Message
From: Sky Dayton
Subject: ALL HELIONS: Field restructuring and other changes

Fellow Helions,

As I shared in my note to you last weekend, we are growing faster than ever before. July was a record month, and August has already smashed July by over 25%. Periods of fast growth are the ideal times to find ways to be more efficient, to strip away the actions that are not producing results and to redouble your efforts on the actions that are working. If done correctly, you solidify your gains and grow even faster.

Over the past few months, your executive team has been hard at work on that equation, and today we are taking an important step that will get us further down the road to profitability.

As most of you are aware, when we started Helio we set up a large field sales organization which eventually grew to five offices around the country. Helio was new, our products and brand were not well known, so this structure allowed us to have a lot of people calling on retailers to make them aware of our company. Over the past year and a half since launch, awareness of Helio has grown, we have launched breakthrough products and services, and we have learned a lot about where consumers are buying. We found that over 80% of our sales were coming from less than 20% of our doors, and that these doors were concentrated in the top 20 markets.

Through this analysis, we realized that although we had excellent people representing us in the field, we were utilizing them very inefficiently. Moreover, we found that we could do a lot more with less: Instead of being spread far and wide with our people, we could concentrate our effort on the top 20 markets and focus on getting the doors that were already producing for us to do more, while at the same time adding more doors that have similar characteristics. And we could accomplish this with a smaller, more targeted field team.

Today we are restructuring our field sales organization. We will still offer our services nationwide, as we do today, and we will still be sold through retailers in every city, as we are today, but we will be reconcentrating our physical field team on the top markets where we are already seeing the bulk of our success. We are going to mine where we know the gold is.

As part of this, we are going to consolidate our field offices from five to two: a West and an East, run by Mike Dickson and Brian DeMauro, respectively. Brian and Mike are accomplished Helio veterans who now have greatly expanded roles. They will lead a team that will include feet on the street in each of our new top 20 markets. Mike and Brian will share more about the new field organization soon.

Our HQ Sales team will continue to be lead by Michael Grossi as interim EVP Sales & Distribution and Jay Lee as interim head of Helio/SKT Sales & Distribution, Terry Hsu, Steve Priesand and George Abdelmalak. We will continue to operate our Company Owned Retail Stores (CORS) and to keep expanding our Company Owned Retail Kiosks (CORKS), which are having early success.

In addition to the field sales restructuring, today we are also slimming the team at HQ, representing about 5% of our overall workforce. Just like in the field but on a smaller scale, we realized that we need to operate more efficiently at Helio House as well.

To those of you that are affected by these changes, we wholeheartedly thank you for your dedication and contributions. You should be proud about what you have accomplished at Helio. Our staff will work with you to do everything we can to help with your transition. We hope that you will continue to be part of the extended Helio family for years to come.

I know many of you have questions. We look forward to sharing more on our updated growth plans at our Sept 5th All Helions meeting. We will also have a Q&A session so we can answer any areas we miss. There is great potential in Helio as long as we stay focused and continue to push ahead.

[Via mocoNews]

The Helio Ocean is many things, but hackable? Never…at least not until now. An enterprising Ocean fanatic has managed to install the ubiquitous Opera Mini browser onto the device. Given the closed nature of the phone, this is quite a feat. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the built in Helio web client when it doesn’t force you into the mobile mode, but options are options, and we’re glad to have a new weapon in our arsenal. Be warned, however, that this is far from a clean process. Most importantly, however, the hack renders the QWERTY keyboard useless as long as Opera is open. Whack! Even so, we applaud the effort, and hope that this is but the tip of the Ocean-hacking iceberg.

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In between The Sopranos and Entourage, Fat Joe took some time out to give us a brief walk through of the Helio Ocean. We don’t dive too much into the tech side, but more the music, ringtones, and music videos. It’s pretty cool you can download full music videos right to the handset, and believe you me, Fat Joe was impressed! Now if I could only get my hands on his sneaker collection…

Helio’s new Ocean handset has got people breaking through the glass! Well, almost. The demand for the phone is so high that the soon-to-be-opened New York City Helio store has begun selling the Ocean in addition to the other 4 flagship locations. They aren’t there all day, but if you catch them at the right time they’ll be glad to set you up. We won’t dive too much into the specs here because that what the video review is for. Phone, IM, SMS, MySpace, QWERTY, wowee! Just Blaze, take it away…

Helio has released the new hotness a bit earlier then expected. As of today you can find it online and in their 5 flagship stores (Santa Monica, Palo Alto, San Diego, Denver, or NYC). If you are looking for it today in other Helio retailers, you will be out of luck till later on in the month. You can also find your local EB Games or Gamestop to trade in that old PSP that’s lying around for some store credit for the Ocean. It’s only $295 with a new account signup, and one of the most anticipated phones of the year. This thing has it all from GPS, Email, IM, dual keyboard, 3G, etc. Check out all of our coverage on this device, then go chuck that T-Mobile Sidekick because the Helio Ocean is the new "it" phone. Until the iPhone comes out that is.

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Thanks to a tip we received, all signs are pointing to a May 21st release for the Helio Ocean. The general consensus around Helio shows a "general release on May 21st" and "limited/internal/partner release is 5-8 (days?) prior." The Helio Ocean is one of the most feature-packed handsets to come along, not sure if you heard of it, but it combines3G with almost every popular IM client and email support, GPS, MySpace Mobile, Plays-For-Sure support and a nifty dual-sliding form factor. Now if it was just on a better network, like the one that doesn’t allow links…

Helio, the cell phone provider that brought us the first MySpace phone, now offers unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling for all of it’s "All In" members. The catch is that you pay for all of the services in their "All In" package, then M2M calls are now free. If you pick and choose your features a la carte, then the additional feature runs an extra $5/month. Finding someone that also has a Helio phone to take advantage of this feature might be a problem with only an estimated 100,000 subscribers, but hey there’s always the oh-so-creepy feature Buddy Beacon to track where nearby Helio users are.

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