Virgin mobile announced two new services for Helio-based phones today, describing themselves as having provided “game-changing features” for mobile social networking.

According to Virgin, the new Helio ‘Connect’ service provides advances mobile-based social networking:

Connect ushers in a new era of community integration for Helio By Virgin Mobile members, allowing them to display friend updates and activity from social media and networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube in an easy-to-use, dashboard-style mobile interface which connects users directly to those sites. Launching first on Helio devices — the Ocean, Mysto, Fin, Heat and Drift — Connect will roll out to Virgin Mobile USA prepaid mobile phones during the first quarter of 2009.

So what’s so special about ‘Connect’ you ask?  Well, supposedly it acts as an aggregate service, allowing users to check status and post updates to all of their favorite social networking sites at once:

Instead of logging out of a social networking site in order to access another one, customers can use Connect to conveniently aggregate status updates, invitations and requests, new photos and videos, comments, messages and more, all in one place, free of charge. Virgin Mobile USA customers can also use Connect’s integrated standard RSS reader to stay up-to-date with their favorite news sites, blogs and e-zines.

So basically it’s like FriendFeed and ping.fm, the latter of which you can access from SMS anyways.

The other service, Mobile Lounge, allows other Helio users to network with each other.  It’s a clever way of keeping Helio users loyal to the device, but unlikely to prove as popular as ‘Connect’ given the broader usage of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as compared with the total number of Helio users out there.

Virgin claims that these features for Helio users positions them as industry leaders for mobile social networking, and certainly any advancement is welcome.  But I have to ask, you know – because I like causing trouble: isn’t the iPhone a more capable and powerful mobile social networking platform?  Because, you know, there are like dedicated and free applications. And stuff.  Just asking.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Mobile Web, Social Computing