 Unfortunately, the Virgin Mobile Shuttle we saw was a pre-release unit, so we didn't get a chance to test the Helio apps that have made their way to Virgin Mobile's pre-paid lineup, but we have to say that seeing the Shuttle in person, it kind of made us sad about how this whole Helio deal has gone down. We use Helio phones personally, outside of work, and we'd come to like the high-end feel of the interface and the tight build of the recent Samsung sliders Helio had been selling. The Virgin Mobile Shuttle is a nice phone for Virgin Mobile's lineup, and even though it lacks the polish of a Helio device, the features that it borrows will make more sense for the pre-paid crowd, especially the social networking fans out there who will like the MySpace and Facebook apps and the Buddy Beacon location-based service.
In our hands-on tests, the feature that made the strongest impression was the haptic feedback. There are a slew of touch-sensitive buttons on the front, and if you come close to pressing these you'll get a strong buzz from the Shuttle. Even when we were pressing the few hardware buttons on the front, we got the buzz. The slide didn't feel as tight as the mechanism on Samsung's sliders for Helio, so we're curious to do more hands-on testing to see just where this phone fits in the high-low ends of the market. Release: September 2008. Price: $80.
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