Samsung’s Mysto

The Helio Mysto is a slender handset, measuring 105mm x 49.5mm x 12.7mm (4.1″ x 1.9″ x 0.5″) and weighing in at a featherweight 96.4g (3.4oz). Don’t be fooled by the slim casing, though. The Mysto is built incredibly solid, with no squeaks or creaks in the housing. The device is weighted evenly and the edges are rounded, offering a pleasant in-hand feel. The Mysto comes in a midnight blue casing with black accents.
The Helio Mysto is the latest handset from U.S.-based MVNO. Manufactured by Samsung, this slim slider sports a 2 megapixel camera, microSD card slot, and touch-sensitive controls with vibration feedback. Is the Helio Mysto’s new design and beautiful display enough to make it stand out?The Helio Mysto sports four touch sensitive buttons on the front of the device, with vibration feedback to confirm when you touch them. The d-pad is circular, with a slight hump at each of the four directions, and a well-defined and easy to use center button. The front is also where you’ll find the Mysto’s beautiful 2.2″ color display, with 240×320 pixel resolution. The left side of the handset houses the volume rocker and a combined power plug/headset port, conveniently covered by a small but sturdy door.

The power button on the Mysto is awkwardly located on the right side of the device, and is oddly painted bright red, making it look very out of place. Below the power button is the camera button, which is also awkward, since you have to slide the phone open to use the camera, and it is operated in portrait mode. The back of the handset is smooth, with a Helio symbol and Samsung label pressed in. There is also a microSD memory card slot, but unfortunately it requires you to remove both the back cover and battery to access it.

The slide mechanism on the Mysto is smooth and spring-assisted, which makes it fun to open and close. Sliding the handset open reveals the standard numeric keypad with excellent backlighting. The keys, however, are completely flat, and offer only limited tactile feedback. The combination of touch-sensitive buttons and a flat keypad make the Mysto have quite the learning curve. The 2 megapixel camera, with LED flash and self-portrait mirror, appears when you slide the handset open.Multimedia / Applications

The Helio Mysto has access to a dizzying array of multimedia content and abilities. Helio offers dozens of applications and games, in addition to backgrounds, ringtones, videos, and music tracks in its online shop. Most items could either be bought, or conveniently rented for a short period of time. An interesting feature is also the ability for users to ‘beg’ for content from other users, or gift content to friends. The prices are slightly high, but it’s hard to find a more fast selection.

The 2 megapixel camera on the Mysto is activated by sliding the phone open and either pressing the camera key on the right side of the device, or navigating to the camera menu. The resulting photos are very nice, and the camera application interface is robust, again with a large number of user options for fine-tuning the photo. The camera also records video clips with acceptable quality, and these clips can be set as the background for the home screen, if desired.

The media player on the Helio Mysto is quite robust too, with support for streaming video and audio, in addition to an on-device media library. Playlists can be created directly on the device, and I was able to use Winamp and the included USB cable to transfer MP3 tracks to the Mysto, as an alternative to using a USB memory card reader to transfer data to the microSD card. The media player screen features several visualization options, as well as a graphic equalizer with several presets. Unfortunately, the Mysto does not allow you to run the music player in the background, so multitasking is not possible.

There are plenty of organizer/PIM functions included on the Mysto, including a full calendar, to-do list, and alarm clock with repeating alerts. There is a wake-up call feature, which is really just another alarm clock, though added abilities such as user-determined snooze times are nice touches. A calculator, world clock, notepad, stopwatch and unit converter round out the organizational applications on this device.

The Mysto comes with several trial games such as My Pet, Platinum Sudoku, 3D Homerun Derby, and Super Boom Boom. My Pet is a slightly addictive game where you adopt a dog that then lives inside your phone and expects to be played with, nurtured, and cared for. You can also set your pet to live on the background of your phone, which can either be incredibly convenient or very annoying, depending on your opinion.

A cool feature of the Helio Mysto is the H.O.T. application (Helio On Top). This free application installs on your home screen and updates periodically, keeping you alert to your favorite news sites. There are a plethora of news streams you can subscribe to, and you can even add your own RSS feeds to the mix.

Since the Mysto has built-in GPS, there are numerous location-aware features of the handset. I purchased the Garmin Mobile application and used it, finding it very easy to navigate and helpful. There is also a really convenient bookmark in the web browser called ‘Where’. This has fun links that use your location to allow you to dig to China (basically tells you where you would end up if you started digging a hole through the earth), get local weather conditions, a GPS-assisted Twitter, and even GasBuddy, to help you find the cheapest nearby gas station. The GPS is fairly accurate and extremely quick to get a fix on my location.User Interface

The Mysto is based on Helio’s custom User Interface, and is actually quite friendly to navigate. However, there are some aspects that I found incredibly annoying. The Mysto does not have dedicated end and send keys, which is extremely confusing and frustrating. The button to the left of the d-pad is a call log/send button, but to end a call, you have to close the slide. Closing the slide always ends the call and takes you back to the main screen. Thus, watching a video in full screen mode requires that you leave the phone slid open. Also, when the phone is closed, all of the front buttons are disabled. This is great for preventing accidental key presses, but it’s very frustrating to have to slide the phone open to access anything.

The function of the softkeys, d-pad, and center key all depend upon how you have your home screen customized. By default, pressing the left softkey takes you to the main menu, the right softkey goes to contacts, and the center of the d-pad takes you to the search function, including the newly launched Tellme feature. Pressing up on the d-pad activates the browser, left takes you to the Videos+Music submenu, down goes to the messaging menu, and right brings you to the games submenu.

The main menu is a circular display of icons, with the name of the currently highlighted icon shown at the bottom of the screen. You can navigate around the circle by repeatedly pressing either the left or right direction on the d-pad, or you can navigate by using the other directions, as well, as you would on a typical grid layout. Once you select a menu option, you enter into a tabbed version of this main menu, where you can once again move side to side to scroll through the icons, and then scroll down to select other options.

The Helio Mysto’s user interface is quite customizable, with the ability to choose from preloaded backgrounds, video backgrounds, or to use a picture taken with the built-in camera. You can also change and move the operator logo and clock display, among other options. There are also several overlays that you can select from, including a calendar, to-do list, and others. There is a menu option to adjust the backlight timer and brightness, as well as the sensitivity of the touch-sensitive buttons on the front of the handset, and you can enable or disable the vibration feedback for those buttons. However, I found the vibration feedback performance to be inconsistent in practice. Often I would use the buttons and have no vibration, other times the vibration was there.

Conclusion

The Helio Mysto is certainly an attractive handset, and the multimedia features are incredibly tempting. However, I found the user interface to be a bit difficult, specifically the inconsistent touch-sensitive keys and slider behavior. The battery life is satisfactory, but there’s nothing that really makes this handset stand out from the rest of the Helio lineup. I would give the Helio Mysto a Recommended rating overall.

You’ll find a gallery of sample photos shot with the Mysto’s 2 megapixel camera on the following page.
Highly Recommended (explan

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