Vodafone 360 H1 review

It may be the age of the smartphone, but what do you do if you want something a bit different? What do you do when you don’t want an iPhone or an Android device, just like all your friends?

Well, there are a few options, but Vodafone has just come up with a brand new one with the 360 H1. Not only is it the first device to incorporate the Vodafone 360 service, which pulls-in your friends’ social networking statuses from online, it also is the first phone to use the LiMo operating system.

LiMo is a smartphone OS designed to go head-to-head with the iPhone OS, WebOS and Android, but how does it perform right off the block?

Your first impression is that it looks rather similar to that of the iPhone, featuring a main menu of rounded-off square icons. However, there are a couple of crucial ways in which it’s different.

The first is that many of the H1’s app icons can be expanded into widgets. So, you might have a weather report app that can be expanded into a mini forecast right there on your homescreen. Then there’s the way you scroll this homescreen. Instead of being sectioned-off into pages, it’s one continuously scrollable space.

While the former is a neat addition and the latter’s a perfectly decent design choice, the general navigation of the Vodafone 360 H1 is too sluggish to make the experience particularly joyful. In spite of having a capacitive touchscreen – the type generally used in top-end smartphones – the H1 isn’t particularly sensitive to the touch.

We’d even go as far as to say that, had we not known to the contrary, we might have assumed that the H1 had a resistive screen. Pretty definite prods are required here, unfortunately. To add to the touchscreen disappointment, it also seems quite frequently inaccurate. Wrong links selected and wrong applications fired up aren’t particularly rare occurrences with the 360 H1.

Oddly, both the sensitivity and accuracy of the H1’s screen seems to change depending on where you are in the interface. Thankfully, the virtual keyboard fares relatively well, although it’s a few steps away from the best touchscreen phones, which the H1 is in direct competition with at its price point.

It’s a real pity that the H1 falls down so badly on this front because, elsewhere in its feature list, it’s a strong contender. There’s a generous 16GB of built-in memory alongside a microSD slot that’ll let you double that figure without too much outlay, the wealth of connectivity options - including Wi-Fi and HSDPA – and a fairly decent 5-megapixel camera.

While the relatively washed-out colours of the photos the H1 produced mean we wouldn’t consider it a compact camera replacer, the autofocus is snappy enough to make sure the H1 can hold its own against rivals like the HTC Hero and iPhone 3GS. It’s got an LED flash too.

A real strong point of the 360 H1 though is its screen, forgetting the touchscreen functionality for a moment. It’s a 3.5-inch AMOLED screen, so naturally it looks great. Contrast levels are very strong and the 800x480 pixel resolution makes sure that every part of the H1’s interface looks resolutely sharp. While a handful of LG and Samsung phones already use this resolution, the iPhone and the majority of Android phones are lagging behind at just 320x480 pixels.

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