Helio Mysto Review

Home screen and Main menu

User Interface:

The main menu on the Mysto is very graphical and is laid out in a circular fashion with Customize, Surf, Snap, Videos & Music, Contact, Games, Plan, Message, and Apps. But as can be expected, there is some delay while navigating through it. Even though there is only the one included theme, you can customize the home screen with you own wallpaper, as well as changing the type of the clock, style and color of the fonts, and dialing style. This allows for a lot of personalization for most users, but there is still the option to download additional themes and layouts from Helio store for a fee.

Phonebook:

The phonebook allows for up to 1000 contacts to be entered, each with their name, five phone number, group, email, MySpace ID, voice activation, and street address. You can also select a specific ringtone to be played and picture to be displayed when a contact calls. After a contact is saved, you can assign them to one of 100 speed dial locations. Just like most other phones, accessing a saved contact is as easy as pressing the right soft key while at the home screen. This will display all of the contacts in an alphabetical list, but you can also narrow the results down by searching for the first or last name, any phone number or email.

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Organizer:

Accessing the calendar is done through the Plan menu. Once there, the current month is shown and the date highlighted. You can use the d-pad to select any month, day, or year that you desire, or change the view from monthly to weekly or daily. Once the desired date is selected, you can add a new event by entering in the event’s name, beginning and end time, if it should repeat, which alarm to play (or vibrate), and which icon to display. Once it is saved, and when that date and time is reached, the phone will display the information on the screen and alert you by playing the selected alarm tone. This is an easy and effective way of keeping track of appointments. There is also the option to setup a To-Do list, Wake-up Call, and independent Alarms. These are useful one-step methods that require less time to setup than having to enter in a calendar event.











Other tools include a calculator, world time clock, unit converter, notepad, and stopwatch. The calculator can only be used for simple arithmetic, the world time shows the current date and time in over two dozen cities (as well as day and night graphics), the unit converter is for converting length, volume, weight, distance, and temperature, the notepad is for entering in quick notes, and the stopwatch for counting minutes and seconds.


The speaker-independent voice commands work well with the Mysto and commands do not require any training by the user. It is conveniently launched by pressing and holding the Send button. Once activated, you can speak the name of a contact or digits to dial, have it send a message, go to a menu, check the phone status, and access a contact. We did not encounter any problems while using the voice commands, and were able to use it even in noisy environments. The only feature that we would like to see added is the ability to use speech-to-text for composing messages. Other Samsung models include this feature, so we’re not sure why it was left out of the Mysto.

There is 100MB of internal memory included on the Mysto that is shared between storing contacts, wallpapers, ringtones, music, pictures, videos, games, and other downloadable applications. The current memory usage is displayed graphically as a pie chart and will show how much is used by downloaded memory, system memory, and USB mass storage. For additional space, you can use a microSD card up to 4GB in size for extended access to music, videos, and pictures.