#Helio phone android
#Helio phone plus

It will treat Helio as its entry into the traditional cell-phone market and operate it to compete with the high-end offerings of traditional cellular carriers. “It’s a terrific deal for us,” says Jayne Wallace, a Virgin Mobile spokeswoman. What’s more, Sprint lowered Virgin Mobile’s pricing. It also gets $50 million in cash from Virgin Group and SK Telecom, and an extra $60 million for its credit line.

#Helio phone plus

It gets the Helio brand, its services, its infrastructure–which Virgin Mobile will adopt as its own–and its customer base, plus approximately 85,000 handsets (Virgin Mobile will eliminate Helio’s retail stores and kiosks). Buying Helio seems unquestionably a good deal for the company. Helio has found a welcome parent in Virgin Mobile. Seybold, a veteran wireless analyst in Santa Barbara, CA. If consumers buy phones and then shop for networks, “the wholesaler can’t make any money, and the person reselling it can’t make any money,” says Andrew M.

#Helio phone android

Still, IDC says that MVNOs represent only 2 percent of the overall mobile phone revenues in the United States.Īt least one analyst thinks that Helio’s fall may foreshadow problems for phones that use Google’s Android platform, which will allow for phones that can be attached to any network. Helio, meanwhile, made about $80 in revenue per month from its typical customer, a far more lucrative market. Virgin Mobile has five million customers and sees revenues of about $21 each per month. Tracfone–with nine million customers, it’s the biggest of these firms–pulls in only about $12 per customer per month. Still, it’s a very low-margin market built on selling prepaid calls. cellular market, according to data from Chetan Sharma Consulting. Such firms hold about 8 percent of the overall U.S. Virgin Mobile and Tracfone are the biggest of at least a dozen firms that sell prepaid phone messaging services to niche markets. All failed, for various reasons.īut there is still life in the concept of renting cellular network capacity.

Disney’s Disney Mobile and Mobile ESPN were out there, as were startups like Voce and Amp’d Mobile.

In 2006, Helio was part of a spate of companies trying to offer high-end services and cell phones without operating their own networks.

Ward also says that the sale of Helio probably marks the end of efforts to create a high-end virtual mobile phone operator in the United States. cellular market, it shares branding with AT&T and is not renting airtime from AT&T. While Apple has more control over its phones than any other phone maker in the U.S. But the iPhone model stops short of being an MVNO, says Lewis Ward, an analyst at International Data Corp (IDC). Sharma says that Helio would have needed a million customers to get to a break-even point.Īpple’s iPhone might seem to fly in the face of this assertion. “The chapter closes on this market, and it’s turning the page,” says Chetan Sharma, president of Chetan Sharma Consulting, based in Issaquah, WA.