Helio, a carrier attempting to target web-savvy phone users, has been constantly critisized for its lack of support for open standards. Like Apple’s iPhone, the MVNO targets the most advanced users, but fails to let them run their own software.
Now, hackers have broken the walled garden that is Helio. Heilocity has posted a copy of Opera Mini 3 (a MIDP 2.0 Java application) that works on the Helio Ocean, and can be downloaded from the phone’s web browser. The group claims to have broken Helio’s protected file wrapper, and says they will soon release an improved system, allowing for any Java application to run on all current Helio phones.
Helio had stated in the past that their phones did not support Java. Now it appears that Helio intentionally disabled Java support to prevent users from running their own applications on Helio devices.
