First impressions of the Samsung H1 360

I spent a bit of last night playing with the Samsung H1 360 device from Vodafone, thanks to David Marutiak (Voda’s User Community Ambassador). It’s been a thoroughly interesting experience.

The handset is gorgeous. Big. It’s very big. But that’s because you get a sumptuous touchscreen to play with. The handset reminds me a lot of Samsung’s recent i8910 (S60) model. I have been thoroughly enjoying the bright pixels and the surprisingly responsive haptic-feedback user interface.

In the main, setup was seamless. That said, I ran into one or two screens where I didn’t understand what I was meant to do. I filmed this a la the N900 videos I did recently. (You’ll see me hesitating and getting the odd thing wrong). During setup and use, I found myself gravitating between two perspectives: –

1. Complete and utter shock that a mobile operator had got so much ‘right’

2. Dismay at the occasional element that only a mobile operator committee could settle on

You’ll see in my videos that I wasn’t entirely comfortable during setup — one of the most important experiences for the user. This is not because I was playing dumb, but because I wanted to get it ‘right’. For instance after I’d created my 360 account, I had the option to .. Well… It was an entirely blank screen with what looked like a ‘plus/add’ option — but there was also an arrow top right which I interpreted as ‘advance to next step’. If it was me, I’d just choose one, knowing in the back of my mind that Voda would want me to add some services — Facebook, for example. If it was a 23-year old girl operating the handset she’d have been entirely stumped and have to guess. All of a sudden her reationship with her device has changed to one where she’s the confused user. Really bad in the iPhone world.

Once I’d added Facebook, I advanced to the next screen. It was blank too. In fact you can hear me on camera umming and ahhing wondering if anything was happening. There was no feedback to say the device was busy polling Facebook to get some initial users to display.

I added my Google account too. Adding accounts is simple enough. It’s my expectations that need to change.

I assumed that by adding Facebook and Google, I’d get all my contacts synched — as a big Google Apps user, I’m accustomed to my devices pulling down my contacts (and email). And for that matter, my calendar too. That didn’t happen. What did arrive down on my device were my Google Talk contacts — good enough for instant messaging. And strangely, my Facebook contacts didn’t come with their phone numbers. So whilst I can see my wife’s photo and status, I can’t call her from the device as I can’t remember her number.

This could well be entirely inaccurate — it’s my first sweep with the device. I’ve had to go back to BlackBerry for this morning (lots of things going on) but I will be swapping back to the H1 to experience more, soon.

Posted via email from MIR Live