With the release of the Fin, Helio has brought some other goods to the table.

First on the list is the new Garmin Mobile application for the Ocean/Fin. Using Google Maps while driving isn’t exactly a bright idea - looking down at a screen = not looking at the road. The Garmin Mobile app is intended to keep you on the road instead of off a cliff, offering turn-by-turn voice navigation. You get to keep your eyes on the road and still know where to go. The cost is steeper than we would have guessed, coming in at 2.99 per day (Rental only). We’ll have a review sometime soon.

Features:
- Turn-by-turn navigation
- Voice directions
- Weather info
- Landscape/Portrait support (for Ocean)

The second is a new version of Helio On Top (H.O.T). Free, and available for all of the Samsung devices (Fin, Heat, Drift). No H.O.T love for the Ocean - looks like the RSS goodness will have to come from somewhere else for now.

Features:
- RSS Feed support. You can now add any RSS feed to H.O.T as a channel via the new H.O.T area of the Helio site.
- Channel Sharing (Recommendations)

While it’s a bummer that it isn’t Ocean compatible, the RSS support is awesome news. People have asked for it since the initial release of H.O.T, so it’s great to see it get implemented.

Hello everyone,
Cristian of MGMaps.com has setup a site so everyone can download a version of MGMaps that will install onto the Helio devices!

More info after the jump:
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Just a quick heads up, for those interested: Opera Mini can be a bit more bandwidth-hungry than the default browser. It loads the page you’d see if you pressed “View in HTML”, taking the Google Mobilizer step out of the process. Google Mobilizer rips a lot of stuff out of the page before forwarding it on to you, effectively shrinking it.

Helio’s TOS states that the “Monthly Limit” is 160 megs, but they have yet to penalize anyone for going over that. As long as you’re not doing anything along the lines of abuse (Tethering, Hosting a server from your Ocean, Streaming constant data), they don’t seem to mind. You could easily use just as much data in the default browser, by pressing “View in HTML”. Heck, I go over it every month with Google Maps and AIM! ^_^ (Not that I recommend going over it on purpose.)

As with any application that uses data, just keep an eye on your data usage. If you’re worried, please use the default browser instead.

Feeling a little left out because you only have a Drift or a Heat device? Be sad no longer! We’ve been working on getting it to these devices as well.

Again, Opera Mini was NOT designed for any of the Helio devices in mind, therefore it may run a bit quirkily. However, it should run just fine for the most part.

Disclaimer:
1) Though we’ve thoroughly tested this, there are always unforeseeable issues. Install at your own risk. We really, really doubt anything could go wrong, but make sure to backup anything important. If things don’t work, you may have to hard reset your device.
2) This is in no way supported by Helio or Opera. If you have trouble getting it to work, Tech support can’t do squat. So don’t bug’em.

Download link after the jump.
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We made you wait a whole two hours for it, and here it is: Custom applications are now possible on the Helio Ocean! The final kinks (We’re glaring at you, file headers.) have been worked out.

It took a lot of effort by a small group of Heliocity members (Huuuge shoutouts to gmonk63 and JustinB, this never could have happened without you guys. No, seriously - they did a ton of work.), but the hard part is over.

The first proof of concept is something that everybody’s been dyin’ for - Opera Mini. That’s right - pure, beautiful, google-proxy-free browsing. It’s not perfect yet - there are a number of bugs we’re workin’ out, but Opera makes a damn good browser.

Download info and more details after the jump

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Awesome news coming tonight - Heliocity exclusive, of course.

We’ve got a present for you. Whatever could it be?

Check back at 8 PM PST, and we’ll tell you.

Going crazy not knowing what it could be? Come kill the next 2 hours talking about it in our forum.

This happened a few days ago, but I completely forgot to mention it. HelioUP was updated to v1.0.2

We’re working on figuring out what the update brings with it, but some fixes have been noticed:

• Up no longer automatically plugs in the captions of the last photo.
• People have reported compatibility with Flickr’s GPS Mapping (Gotta enable it in your Flickr.com account options)
• HelioUP still refuses to bake me delicious cookies.

Let us know if you find any more changes.

To update: Go into the Camera screen (Menu -> 3), and open your Photo Album. Highlight a photo, and open HelioUP (Menu -> 3). Once up is open, open the menu and press “Check for Updates” (Menu -> 1).

Since posting the note about Exchange support, we got a flood of nastygrams. People, apparently a bit disappointed in us for not being too mad about the Exchange fees. Threw some names at us, too! No harm done - We still love you guys. So let’s talk about it.

For those shouting “Sell-Outs!”, don’t worry - that’s not the path we’re heading down. While the fees may not bother us (We weren’t waiting for exchange, and weren’t keeping tabs on who was), we don’t expect everyone else to be perfectly content with it. We work hard to represent the community, even if the community’s opinion may differ a bit from ours. So, Exchange-using Helions around the country, we want you to tell us what’s up.

Come over to this forum thread, and fill us in.