Vodafone 360 H1 review: hands-on

The Samsung H1 is the first device to use the Vodafone 360, the network’s own social networking and contacts aggregation solution. In short, that means it grabs all the details of your friends – and even enemies – from various email accounts and social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The H1 itself is a fairly vanilla-looking touchscreen device, but it ticks a lot of the boxes. For starters, there’s a large, 3.5-inch capacitive screen. It uses an OLED display, making the blacks incredibly black and the colours impressively vivid. We haven’t checked out any videos on the H1, but we can imagine it’ll be a competent mini media player. It can hack DivX files too.

There’s a 3.5mm jack on the top of the device as well, so it’ll make a decent MP3 player replacer too. Plus, there’s 16GB of internal memory, alowing you to load it up with music and video files.

The LiMo operating system has a look that clearly takes a few cues from the iPhone, with a horizontally scrolling main menu populated primarily with little square app and function icons.

However, some app icons can also be expanded out into widgets. We checked out Accuweather, one of the Vodafone 360’s launch apps, which grew to a mini weather forecast with a tap. To enter the app properly, you just double tap on this expanded widget.

This ability to jump between using icon shortcuts and widgets is part of the LiMo operating system’s charm, but it all depends on whether specific apps are designed to allow this dual widget functionality – it’s not something build into every single app.

The dedicated Vodafone 360 app store itself, which was still being worked on at the time of testing, is where you’ll have to get your apps for the H1. Of course, because the LiMo app train has only just left the station, it’s nowhere near as packed as the Android Market or even the BlackBerry App World. However, Vodafone assures us that there are plenty of developers on board.

On the games side, you’ll be looking at Java game ports for the time being – so, nothing that’ll conspicuously make use of whatever grunt the H1 has under its bonnet – but there were several entries from big publishers like EA and Gameloft.

The real raison d’etre of the H1 is the core of the Vodafone 360 service though. The H1 gives it the centre stage position, allocating one of the of the three physics buttons for this very purpose. The centre ‘people’ button fires up 360, wherever you are.

The standard layout of this is rather flashy, using 3D floating panes to display your contacts, each of which is accompanied by an image avatar, where available. About six contacts are displayed on the screen, while downward swipes scroll between pages. Moving between these pages of contacts wasn’t quite as slick as we’d like, considering the H1’s capacitive touchscreen, but hopefully this is something that’ll get greased up with an incremental update.

However, 360 also lets you split your contacts up into a handful of different groups, each of which is linked with a certain colour. You might have ‘Gmail contacts’, ‘family’ and ‘work friends’. These sit under tabs that sit in a row at the bottom of the screen. Intuitively, sideways swipes navigate between them.

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