There has been lots of news about mobile phone applications, or widgets, in the past months. Using a compatible mobile phone you can bid on Ebay, update your MySpace site, get directions, find businesses, and program your DVR just to name a few.

In this post I have completed a quick summary of those that have caught my attention. I am sure there are many others so let me know and I will include them in the next summary (perhaps in a month or so).

Walking with friends recently in Manhattan, I passed a big Helio billboard. “Helio,” said a friend, “what’s that?” Mind you, this billboard had a picture of a cellphone on it. And it had the words “Helio” and “mobile” in very close proximity. Still, they didn’t have a clue. I cringed. Because Helio, as we tech-savvy readers know, is a heavily-marketed Earthlink (ELNK)/SK Mobile-owned service provider with exclusive devices catering to the young, Webified, and affluent—the sort of folks I was walking around with. Granted, none among us had an active MySpace page, which is a big part of Helio’s plan to integrate the phone with MySpace profiles, letting users shootpictures and music back and forth. But still, it was surprising that none of Helio’s blitz had reached them.

Vodafone and MySpace.com announced today a partnership to offer Vodafone customers a MySpace experience via their mobile phones in Europe.

Launching first in the UK, the partnership will enable millions of Vodafone customers to access MySpace Mobile, allowing them to edit their own MySpace profiles, find and add friends, post photos and blogs and send and receive MySpace messages while on the move.

MySpace Mobile will be pre-loaded on future, selected Vodafone handsets to offer customers an ‘out of the box’ experience, and available for download from Vodafone live!.

All hail the new king of Helio’s lineup: “Ocean.” That ain’t really hyperbole, either; the Pantech-sourced device first seen in the FCC’s claws a few months back easily has enough tricks up its sleeve to put it atop Helio’s already impressive stable of featurephones. Most striking, of course, is the dual-slide design with QWERTY in one direction and numeric in the other — a first, as best we can tell — that gives users the best of both worlds without compromising much girth (21.8mm to be exact). Other unique goodies include a contact list with integrated “presence detection” showing contacts’ statuses on a variety of instant messaging services, Exchange Server integration (!) for the suits out there, and a click-free web search mechanism — users simply begin typing from their home screen to seek out sites. The Ocean will rock out to tunes for a claimed 15 hours (pretty frickin’ impressive if that figure holds up), offer 200MB of internal storage with microSD expansion, a 2 megapixel cam, and stereo Bluetooth support. Look for it to start showing up on shelves before summer sets in for $295.

Helio, the heavily-marketed smartphone maker, today launched its latest device, the Ocean. The modest name is clearly meant to suggest comprehensiveness, and the Ocean does seem to be feature-rich: nifty dual sliding keyboards, big color screen, a universal EVDO-powered Inbox that supports Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Instant Messenger (among others); not to mention a 2.0 megapixel camera with flash, music player, a GPS system that works with the built-in Google (GOOG) maps.