Helio's Like A Virgin, Or Is Virgin, I Can't Tell Anymore

If you didn't hear the announcement last week, Virgin Mobile and Helio have plans to get hitched, which left some people a bit confused, even though we kinda expected it. You see, Helio is known for their ultra-techy phones like the Ocean (love it!) and extensive data plans (at least by the meager few who use Helio), and Virgin Mobile as a popular prepaid phone service. One catered to the high-end tech enthusiast, and the other catered toward the low-end pre-teen, so… there's been some confusion on the whys and what-fors.

Today, Virgin and Helio made a few of their ideas public. The Helio name will be going away, but the service will stay. It appears that Virgin will be migrating it's stuff more toward the Helio platform, not the other way around, and Virgin has plans to offer Helio's service for cheaper than Helio currently offers it themselves. They also plan on keeping Helio's phone selection around and have plans to offer them to more people.

When I heard the announcement, I though it made sense, aside from the drastic difference in customer base. All the carriers have prepaid versions of their service out there now, and many times prepaid customers turn into contract customers (I think prepaid is an excellent way to test out a network before jumping all in to a contract). But Helio and Virgin each only had one piece of that puzzle, so this helps solve that problem. The techy, data heavy phones will also appeal to the prepaid pre-teens that love texting and Facebook, as well as sharing videos with each other, assuming it can translate to a prepaid option. Both companies operate off of the Sprint/Nextel network as well, so that makes the transition that much easier.

While turning the Ocean and other Helio phones into prepaid options hasn't been expressly stated yet, I'm thinking that would be a smart direction to go. The Ocean was raved about by almost every reviewer that touched it, but many people stayed away, even after it dropped to $200 for the phone and just $99/month unlimited everything. We'll have to wait and see on this one. Hopefully, Virgin can turn things around for Helio.