Just a week ago, we reviewed and held a contest for the new Helio Ocean skins. We had a great turnout for the contest, most likely because it involved one simple comment (You lazies). We’ve selected the winners at random from the comments on that post, and here they are!

Thanks for participating, and don’t be jealous or disappointed if you didn’t win! We love giving stuff away, and I’m sure you guys love getting the stuff we give away! If you missed the review, you can read/look at it again here.

We also received many messages about where to purchase the skins from, and it is kind of hidden away (*wink wink nudge nudge Helio*). To purchase them, you just need to login to your account at https://selfcare.helio.com, and follow the link titled “Order Accessories“. Make sure your Ocean is the active device on your account, otherwise you won’t be able to view the skins for it. As well as having the Ocean as your current device, you will also need to be logged into the main line of your account if you have more than one line.

Still having problems finding it? Click the following picture, it should expand, and look for the green arrows.

As you may or may not have noticed, you can now purchase a selection of five Helio Ocean skins from the online Helio store, and we were able to get our hands on some from Helio to check em’ out! They are the same kind you can get from MyTego.com except the price is half of what you’d pay there. At just $15 dollars a pop, it isn’t too bad for some harmless customization.

And since we didn’t want them all to go to waste, we only applied one of them for the review so we could give the other four away in a … *dramatic drumroll* … contest!

To enter just comment on this post and we will randomly pick four people. Remember, we need to be able to contact you if you win, so make sure when you comment you are using a valid e-mail address. Only one entry per person. Enjoy! Contest ends May 31st, 2008 at 11:59pm

Maaaaaaaaaaan! It has been a crazy couple of weeks. Busy, busy, busy.

I finally got a chance to pop together the white Ocean this morning. I’ll be popping it apart one final time to fix a few mistakes I hadn’t noticed and do one final wet sand/touch up job, but these give you a good idea of how it will look in its final form.

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Click for a larger image

Bam! I’m now the proud owner of a white Helio Ocean. Okay, fine - I’m the proud owner of a white Helio Ocean body and a bunch of disassembled Helio Ocean pieces. But it’s getting closer!

I sprayed it in about 15 light coats over the period of a day and a half. The texture is gorgeous, looking far less spray-painty than I expected. It still needs a light wet sanding before it’s clear coated, but it was nice to not have to deal with nasty orange peeling.

(Ignore the big solid white areas in the middle of the frame pieces - it’s just masking tape.)

Pretty soon comes clear coating, where I’ve got a decision to make: Do I spend around six dollars on a really nice, hard clear coat.. or do I dump 53 dollars (after shipping) into getting a can of soft-touch clear coat? First will look shiny and sexy, but the latter’s texture will be much more like the original Ocean paint job. I’m definitely leaning toward the first option for the sake of not making myself poor.

And now I’m going to make your silver pants blue black Ocean white!

The hunt continues. Last post, I was trying to track down an Ocean body that hadn’t been sprayed with its soft-touch coat yet.

After about a week and a half of digging around, it didn’t seem like this was going to happen. So, I said screw it - If I couldn’t get an Ocean body that hadn’t been sprayed with soft touch yet, I’d remove the soft touch coat myself.

I did a bit of research, trying to find any chemical strong enough to remove the clear coat but weak enough that it wouldn’t eat the plastic. It seemed like for every one person saying something would work fine, another three were saying it would destroy the plastic and punch me in the face. I didn’t really want to take any chances, so I grabbed some sand paper and a bottle of elbow grease, and attacked.

(For good measure, I wore a respirator I had laying around. I had no idea what would be flying around in the area as I sanded this thing down. I was doing the sanding out in front of my house, which was probably not the best idea in hindsight. My gas-mask-esque contraption totally spooked at least 2 of my neighbors.)

About 3 hours of disassembly and sanding later, my Ocean is ready for painting:

Click for larger image

It was a bit of work to make sure I didn’t accidentally round any of the surface edges, break any tabs, or scratch up the camera mirror - but it all worked out, as far as I can tell. I lost the Helio logo that was pressed into the paint on the battery, but I’m pretty sure that was unavoidable.

Next Steps:

1. Masking off all the stuff that needs to be masked.
2. Give it a solid cleaning
3. Spray it with 5 or so uber light coats, possibly sanding between coats depending on how it’s holding.
4. Clear coat
5. Reassembly
6. White Ocean Whoooooo!

Off to the hardware store to research paints and clear coats. More coming as it’s finished.

As cognitive beings, we’re all smart enough to avoid trying to squeeze a heart-felt love letter into a 160 character text. At least, we are when we’re sober. Throw down a couple of drinks, and everyone in your contact list gets a love letter or five.

SuperNews’ “Texting Your Way to Love” documents the steps involved in drunken mobile flirting, and one of its boozed up stars looks pretty friggin’ familiar. (Hey - that explains the Ocean’s occasional lag: It’s not buggy. Just hungover.)

Video might not be safe for school/work - nothin’ too bad, but there’s a bit of swearing and some phone-on-phone lovin’.

(Thanks to nvoutback for pointing this out!)

If you’ve ever spent a few minutes talking with me, you’ve probably learned at least three things:

• I’m allergic to mushrooms.
• I think yams are the whackest of all the vegetables
• I really want a white Helio Ocean.

Actually, you probably haven’t learned any of that. I don’t really talk about those things often - it just seemed like an interesting intro. Regardless, they’re all true. I can’t do much about the first item, and yams are too far gone at this point for anybody to save. But that last item, my desire for a white Ocean.. I think something can be done about that.

From what I hear, there was at least a color sample made of a white Ocean. For one reason or another it wasn’t what they were looking for, so it never saw the light of day. As I’m probably not going to convince Helio to run a white bodied series just because I think it would look mega rad, the task of making one will involve a little bit of leg work and a lot of tearing things apart.

So why not just rip the body off an ocean and spray it white? The main obstacle is the soft touch coat that covers the body already. Soft touch is a spray on plastic paint that gives your ocean’s body that smooth feeling that everyone notices when they first grab the device. It feels awesome, but it makes color modding the device tough - most paints just wont stick to it. If they do, they tend to look sort of diseased after drying.

The first challenge is getting an Ocean body sans soft touch. As I see it, there are two options here:

1) Strip the paint:

I could attempt to strip an Ocean body of it’s soft touch coat. However, I have no idea if this is even possible. As it’s really just a sort of spray on plastic, how could I remove the soft touch coat without eating at the body?

Advantages: Cheap
Disadvantages: Probably wont work, and might just ruin the body.

2) Get a body that hasn’t been sprayed with soft touch yet

This one’s a bit daunting, but it’s probably the best possible route. Somewhere in the magical land that is the Pantech factory, theres gotta be a point in the manufacturing process where the bodies are molded but not yet sprayed with soft touch.

These untouched shells, these perfect canvases - they’re out there, half way around the world. The question is whether or not I’d be able to get one. I’d gladly pay for one, if that were an option. Folks from Helio read this blog all the time - any of them reading this and happen to know the right person at Pantech? Gimme a shout.

Advantages: Takes a lot of the “This will probably end up really ugly” factor out of the process.
Disadvantages: Kind of crazy.

There are probably a number of other options (fabricating my own body, for example.) that I haven’t covered here. If you have any ideas, be sure to leave a comment.

The Process:

1. Somehow, end up with an Ocean body without the soft touch paint.
2. Determine the best way to color the body. Perhaps the guys from Colorware will be down for the project? If all else fails, spray paint.
3. Tear apart the Ocean, removing its original body
4. Install super awesome white body
5. Triumphantly thrust Ocean above my head while victory theme plays

One way or another, my Ocean’s going white. I’ll post updates (and pictures) as they go down.

It’s a rare treat to get a glimpse of any device’s prototype form. It’s like getting to go through a friend’s photo albums from the years before you met them, back when they rocked headgear and a mullet.

Knowing that we can’t get enough of this stuff, our buddy HelioSKT from over at Helio House sent over a bunch of shots of the Kickflip, Hero, and Ocean in their prototype forms. It’s a trip to see some of the transformations these devices went through - especially the Kickflip. (Edit for clarification: These are previously unseen photos of past device prototypes - not unreleased shots of things to come.)

Many more pictures after the jump.

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