Vodafone 360 H1 review

Vodafone’s Samsung-manufactured 360 H1 represents a bold move for the carrier. Where virtually every other mobile phone player is heading down the Android road to smartphone success, Vodafone has gone for broke and pegged its hopes on the all-new LiMo OS and its own Vodafone 360 social networking service – does the gamble pay off though? Find out in our Vodafone 360 H1 review.

In pure feature list terms, the Vodafone 360 H1 ticks a lot of boxes. It’s got a big 3.5-inch OLED screen that uses capacitive touch technology – that’s the finger-friendly sort used on the iPhone. Then there’s the onboard 16GB storage and accompanying microSD slot, meaning you’ll be able to bump this up to 32GB if you fancy and still have change from a twenty. Plus, it’s got what every high-end phone seems to need these days – an app store.

Unfortunately, there are a few ghosts in this machine that stop if from being able to spar with the best. The first, and perhaps most important, is the responsiveness of the touchscreen. Although the 360 H1 uses a capacitive screen, we didn’t find it all that keen to pick up our taps at times. Add this to the inaccuracy issues associated with this type of touch screen and you‘re not in for an entirely good time. Oddly, its performance rollercoaster’d up and down depending on where you were in the interface, suggesting it might partly be a software issue.

Vodafone 360 H1 unboxed!

For starters, the menu layout is a dead ringer for that of Apple‘s money-spinner, featuring those familiar and friendly-looking bevelled icons. A neat feature of the 360 H1’s LiMo OS though is that some of these icons can be expanded into widgets right there within the menu- weather reports and RSS style news update apps, for example.

As you might imagine though, Vodafone’s LiMo app Shop is a bit sparsely populated at present. Criticising the phone for this is a bit like telling a baby off for not being able to reach the top shelf of the cupboard, but going down the LiMo road was Vodafone’s choice after all. Plus, if the App Shop ever reaches the App Store’s size, we’ll eat all the hats from here to Edinburgh. And we’re based in London.

Of course, we can’t end a review of the Vodafone 360 H1 without mentioning the 360 service, especially since this is the first handset to use it. Well, it looks very nice, but using it with its fancy 3D interface is a bit like using cover flow on your iPod to select albums – not a sensible option. Turn this off and it amounts to a contacts book that harvests status updates. Nice, but nothing particularly new.

The Vodafone 360 H1 isn’t a bad phone. That screen’s still a definite looker that we’d happily watch a movie on and the camera, at five megapixels, isn’t too shabby either, although colours were a little washed-out in our tests. Still, it’s playing with the big boys now and has let in a few too many goals for our liking.