Helio Heats up its lineup with a new phone

Helio has announced a brand new cell phone in its lineup, and no, it's not that QWERTY phone that we were all excited about a week ago. Instead, it's a slim and shiny slider phone called the Heat, which appears to be the glam version of the company's much more sedate-looking Drift. The big design difference is that the Heat features "electrostatic" touch-sensitive buttons, much like the ones on the LG Chocolate. The touchpad includes the standard soft key and navigational buttons as well as dedicated music-player controls. It comes in onyx black as well as gold, for that extra luxury factor.

Aside from that, this Samsung-made phone doesn't appear to be too different from the Drift. It's a tad smaller and lighter (the Heat measures 3.6 inches long by 1.8 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and weighs 3.17 ounces) and has more internal memory (136MB on the Heat versus 128MB on the Drift), but we're a little disappointed that the Heat only sports a 1.3-megapixel camera, especially when compared to the 2.0-megapixel cameras on other Helio phones like the Hero and the Kickflip.

Much of the Heat's features also can be found on the Drift: MPEG-4 video recording, EV-DO speeds, a built-in photo studio, USB Mass Storage mode, stereo Bluetooth, MP3 player, built-in GPS with access to GPS-enabled services like Buddy Beacon (Helio's friend-finding service) and Google Maps, plus access to all of Helio's services like MySpace Mobile and video on-demand. The Heat also provides support for Helio Music, which is Helio's latest foray into the world of over-the-air music downloads.

The Heat phone from Helio is available starting this month from Helio.com for $150 each. The black one is first to market while the gold version will come later.