Review: Pantech Ocean 2
Messaging is one of the O2's fortes. It covers nearly every form of messaging known to man. In fact, I am surprised there isn't a Morse Code tool buried somewhere in the Ultimate Inbox.
Out of the box, the O2 has email loaded for Helio Mail and Exchange, as well as POP3 emails providers Yahoo, AOL, Google, Hotmail, and EarthLink, with the ability to add more. Signing into an email account also means that you're signing into that accounts IM service (if you use it). When I logged into my Yahoo account, my IM contacts automatically populated the screen. There are three tabs, one for IM contacts, one for IM conversations, and a last one for your email.
All of the in-boxes look great on the screen. IM conversations are easy to maintain with the tabbed system, and email can be synced however often you wish. You can choose to save email addresses in your inbox as new contacts, which is handy. The O2 did have some trouble displaying HTML emails. In fact, it didn't work at all, no matter what account I signed in through. Instead, all I saw was the angle-bracketed code.
The integration of email and IM is really well done and useful if that's how you like to manage your contacts and conversations. It is very much like the desktop version (of Yahoo, anyway) so that you are logged into both services at once.
For SMS/MMS, the composition screen is very well done. You can type in addressees manually, or insert them via your contacts application. In QWERTY mode, the emoticon button brings up several different screens of graphics that can be inserted into messages.
Adding content - such as picture, video or audio files - is as simple as clicking a button.