Greg Kumparak from Mobilecrunch has a sad story published on the site today, regarding Helio’s recent death. This is not a buyout or something, as the company was purchased by Virgin Mobile 2 years ago. Now, they pulled the plug on Helio for good…
Helio was a wireless MVNO operated in partnership by EarthLink and South Korean carrier SK Telecom. The Mobilecrunch editor mentions his love for Helio devices and the community called Heliocity, that he founded back in the days, for every Helio fan to participate in and discuss the devices.
What’s really interesting is that Greg shows us a glimpse of the device that could have saved Helio, the Helio Ocean 3. We must mention that this was supposed to be the very first handset to run Android, a project discussed back in 2008 and that the phone should have been built by Samsung, not Pantech, like Ocean 1 and 2.
Only one prototype was built, the one you can see in this article and it was well guarded till this day. What can we say? RIP Helio and maybe your projects will be used by another brand, more wisely this time.
[via mobilecrunch]
