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At CTIA Wireless 2007 Helio, the Mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) for the young and hip, announced the long-awaited Ocean, its new 3G handset featuring a dual-slider that combines both a numeric keypad and a separate full QWERTY thumb-keyboard to make tasks such as sending instant messages or e-mail easier.

The new Ocean also offers full over-the-air music downloads, video-on-demand, a 2.4-inch, 260K color high-resolution QVGA display, a 2 megapixel high-resolution camera, a microSD slot, 200MB of internal storage, an HTML browser, MySpace on Helio, GPS-enabled Google Maps for mobile, Buddy Beacon and other features. The PlaysForSure compatible handset promises an excellent 15 hours of music-listening on a single charge.

Ocean's integrated messaging dashboard includes access to multiple public e-mail services and also incorporates Instant Message access through Yahoo Messenger, AOL's AIM Service and Windows Live Messenger.

Ocean is only 21.8 millimeters thick, impressive for a dual-slider. It weighs 3.17 ounces.

Helio plans to ship the smartphone this Spring at a suggested retail price of $295.

Launched last spring, the MVNO, a joint venture between Earthlink and South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom, is named after Copernican's 16th Century Heliocentric theory of the Sun as center of the universe. As a brand, it is supposed to conjure how central mobility - the mobile phone in particular - is in young peoples lives.

Helio targets tech-savvy 18 to 34 year olds through its partnership with the mega-social-networking site MySpace.