Helio launches with big price tag

As expected, Helio, the joint venture between SK Telecom and EarthLink, officially launched its MVNO service aimed at the young, tech-savvy (and wealthy) demographic. The monthly rates start at a whopping $85 for 1000 "anytime" minutes and scale up to $100 a month for 1500 such minutes and $135 a month for 2,500 minutes. One of the MVNO's original apps is called Helio on Top (HOT), and it enables subscribers to program live content feeds to their handsets' idle screens from 10 live channels, including CNN, Fox Sports, MTV News, MySpace, Surfline and Yahoo. Supposedly Helio is working on RSS compatibility, and some analysts say they should have waited to launch with RSS enabled. 

Other unique offerings from Helio include "begging" and "gifting" features that enable subscribers to purchase a mobile game or other content for a fellow Helio customer (gifting) or ask another Helio customer to buy content for them (begging). Helio recently announced a whole slew of mobile games from a broad swath of publishers and announced pricing for the games as $5.99 to buy or $.99 to rent for a week. The EarthLink connection has also created much speculation that the service will include some fixed-mobile convergence features, but the company has yet to confirm such rumors.

For more on Helio's launch:
- see this article from CNET