Vodafone to launch free social network aggregation service along with new phone

 

Gallery

Posted on 28 Oct 2009 at 12:57

Vodafone has announced its new 360 service, which lets you pull together your contacts from various online services such as Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Facebook. The service, accessible via the web, is free to everyone, but it works best in conjunction with the new Samsung H1 phone, which runs LiMo (Linux Mobile) and comes with dedicated 360 software.

Much like HTC's Sense or Motorola's MOTOBLUR software, 360 is designed to aggregate social network contacts and other data so you can focus on the people in your life rather than having to deal with a variety of different web pages. Once you've entered your details for each service, 360 will pull in all your contacts, and merge duplicates. It will also pull in your various email accounts, but unfortunately doesn't work with online calendars yet.

The service is web-based, and is free for anyone to use. Vodafone said that software for Symbian phones would be out shortly, and support for Android wouldn't be far behind, but for the moment the only phone that works with the service is the new Samsung H1. This has a 3.5in OLED screen, a 5-megapixel camera and 16GB of internal memory, with a microSDHC card slot for expansion. It has GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth, and is powered by a 600MHz ARM Cortex A8 processor. We had a quick play with it and found the touch-controlled interface to be reasonably quick and smooth.

On the phone, the software puts your contacts centre-stage, with a 3D interface where icons for each contact are arranged in a cloud that can be navigated by swiping forward and back. Tapping a contact brings up all the information for that contact - emails, texts, Facebook statuses etc. One clever feature is the ability to quickly send contacts your location, and there's also a locational bookmark feature, much like HTC's Footprints app or Brightkite.

The LiMo operating system looks and feels quite similar to Android, but we're worried that it won't have quite as many developers behind it to create compelling apps for the platform. Still, more operating systems means more competition and puts pressure on legacy operating systems, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry, to update or die. In our opinion, it's the developers who will decide the outcome.

The H1 will be available on Friday and will be free on a £35-per-month, 24-month contract. If that's too dear for you, the H1 will be followed in November by a more modest model called the M1, which Vodafone promises will be more affordable but will still fully support the 360 service.

Author: Barry de la Rosa