Vodafone 360 was launched in October and is still having teething problems. For a start, the manufacturer doesn't seem to know if it's a way of feeding your social networks into one place or a social network all on its own. If this is the case it's not very effective – you  can only network with people on Vodafone with 360-capable handset, and the only one of those around at the moment is the H1.

 

Appearance and features for the Samsung H1

The Samsung H1 is necessarily a high-end smartphone because of its 360 optimisation. But its high spec – and price tag – is not apparent from the way it looks. It's a large phone with a light silver finish and lots of buttons on its back and sides – it lacks the stylish, minimalist design that we tend to associate with smartphones.

However, it's stuffed full of high-end features including a five-megapixel camera with LED flash, a dedicated search button in look-at-me red and a dedicated camera button, zoom and volume control, a miniUSB slot and two little vents for the speaker. Below the 3.5-inch AMOLED touch-screen sit the Call button and Vodafone 360 Apps and Contacts buttons.

 

Setting up the Samsung H1

When you first switch on the Samsung H1 you will be prompted to sign up for a Vodafone 360 profile, which means linking to all your other social networks. At the moment that means Google, Facebook, Windows Live, AOL and a few odd ones including XXX. Twitter, we are told, is on its way.

When you are set up, you can see all your contacts from all your accounts on one screen, which you  access via the Contacts button. If you prefer, you can have separate screens for each account as well as customisable pages for work, family and friends. Move between these screens with a simple scrolling motion. And if that's not enough you can create different groups of contacts too – you had better have a lot of friends to make the best use of the H1.

All your calls, messages, emails and chat notifications show up on the lock screen, alongside a funky digital clock. To make phone calls – remember them? - you just tap the top of the screen to bring up the dialler.

 

Vodafone 360 on the Samsung H1

360 is the central feature of the Samsung H1. That home screen is the most noticeable evidence of this. Your contacts are filtered by the ones you use the most for email, text and 360 networking. The 'location nudge' feature allows you to contact your 360 contacts via GPS and send them your exact co-ordinates and a map link. It all sound great in theory, but the 3D view for the mini contact cards shows you eight cards up front and tiny background cards that are meant to give the effect of distance. What it does is make things quite messy, although you do get used to it after a while.

Adding to the confusion, if you have a most contacted friend in three different places, like Facebook, Google and a Friends list, they will show up on all three screens and the screen with all your contacts on. It may make you feel four times as popular as you are, though.

Your contacts are synced by email address instead of names. We can understand why Vodafone chose to do this, as email addresses are unique while names can be the same. But really, how many of your contacts have exactly the same name? It means that if you have a contact with one email address for Google and another for Facebook, you have to sync the contacts manually via the 360 website, which is frankly a lot of effort for what should be a fairly simple task.

 

Social networking on the Samsung H1

We've already mentioned that you can sync your Facebook contacts to the H1, but you can't view status updates on their contact card, and can't click through to the Facebook site either. In fact, there isn't even a Facebook app for this phone. You can view status updates in full on a separate screen but not get to them via your contact's profile. And while you can look at updates by tapping the 'Saying' icon on the toolbar, you can't comment on them.

And that's pretty much our main complaint about the H1 – you've got a huge amount of information whether you want it or not, but it's not intuitive and doesn't give you much option for interaction. It's just not in the same league as HTC's social networking interface, which lets you view and click through to Facebook and Flickr.

 

Keyboard and apps on the Samsung H1

Central to any social networking phone is the keyboard – unfortunately the keyboard on the H1 isn't that good. Yes, it's responsive and accurate, but its flaws tend to disguise that. Auto-suggest does little more than display a list of possibilities to choose from, meaning more button pressing after you've misspelled a word or entered one the phone doesn't know. You also have to click every time you want punctuation or numbers, which are sadly lacking from the main screen. You won't get returned to the main screen automatically – another click does it manually. We did get a bit tired of all that clicking after a while.

The Apps menu is good, though. You access it by pressing the dedicated button on the front of the phone and it's a pleasing grid-style menu, very much like the iPhone's. You can customise it with widgets for a nice combination of 1x1 app shortcuts and 2x2 widgets. This is also where you find shortcuts to programs like the Vodafone app shop, where you can download apps direct to the handset. These cost between nothing and £5, but you can't see how much an app costs until you actually click on it.

 

Web browsing on the Samsung H1

The Samsung H1 features a full HTML web browser that makes for a great internet experience, especially when paired with the responsive touch-screen. And there are all sorts of innovative ways to zoom in and out of pages and click links: double tap and you get a box telling you the zoom magnification, then drag the box up or down to zoom in or out. You can also do this in the Maps program. To click on a link, tap down near it to produce a magnified view of the area. Then simply click on the link you want. This neatly solves one of the problems inherent in web browsing on a mobile handset.

 

Camera on the Samsung H1

We've come to expect a good standard of camera on Samsung phones, and the H1's five-megapixel model is rather good, with anti-shake, flash and geo-tagging. Auto settings include a useful setting for taking pictures against light, as well as landscape, sunrise and sunset, among others. There's no macro, but the quick shutter release means you get a good result from action photos. Our finished shots were on the green side, but that was more than made up for with the photo editing tools: alongside all the usual fixing tools, you can draw on photos or add fun filters like 'cartoon' and 'magic pen'. Our favourite extra is the automatic over-the-air backup of all your photos to the 360 website.

There's also a music player on the H1, which is enhanced by a 3.5mm audio port, decent in-ear headphones and a staggering 16GB of internal memory for storing a ton of tunes.

 

The verdict on the Samsung H1

For all its social networking hubris, the H1 isn't really effective in that department unless you know a lot of people on Vodafone 360 (which is currently only those with a H1) – you can only view what's going on, with no way to interact. We've no idea why you can instant message on Gtalk when you can't on Windows Live, and there isn't even a Facebook app available.

But it does support more networks than any other phone on the market, and it has a responsive AMOLED touch-screen, good media features and a lovely simple user interface. This is the first Vodafone 360 phone and hopefully, as more start to appear, the service will become simpler.

 

Buy The Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 Here