Chris Gilmer , Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Social networking on mobile devices is about to take off with the latest venture by Earthlink founder, Sky Dayton. Helio is leveraging the experience to take social networking, and MySpace on to mobile devices.

With the launch of the Helio service, users will be able to post and read the site for free. The service will launch in a few months with two different phones.

“We’re able to leverage a lot of that experience about how to take social networking and put it on a device,” said Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and chief executive of Helio.

Helio’s two phones, dubbed “Hero” and “Kickflip” will be based on Korean designs. Made by Pantech and VK Mobile, the phones will feature large color screens and cameras, but no QWERTY keyboards.

Helio is run on a mobile virtual network operator, meaning it won’t have its own cellular network, and instead, it will buy access to Sprint Nextel Corp.’s and Verizon Wireless’ high-speed networks.