Swapped out the Samsung H1 for the BlackBerry

I couldn’t go on with the Vodafone 360 Samsung H1. I’ve had to change to my BlackBerry Bold this morning. This is a reflection on my requirements from a handset, not on the Samsung or Big Red’s 360. I need a certain type of always-on messaging and I need my contatcs/calendar synched with Google. 360, of course, isn’t aimed at me — the confirmed mobile geek — it’s aimed squarely at the end consumer. The normob from Hartlepool.

I’m missing 360 already as I bash out this post. Let me tell you some more good things I’ve observed.

First, the battery is good. Very good. This is highly unusual in a touchscreen device. By the end of the day (I mean midnight) the battery still held about 65% charge. Nice. Enough to stretch well into the next day I’ll warrant. Remember that the device is more or less always-on if you’re connected to the Vodafone 360 service.

And it’s 360 that I’m missing. This morning, for example, I picked up the Samsung and was immediately presented with the little square profile picture status update screen. I saw right away that my brother has just left JFK bound for London. I moved the squares around (the closest I’ve got to being Tom Cruise in Minority Report on a handset) and had a brief scan of some other status updates. I came back to my brother’s image, tapped it and hit the message icon. I knocked out a quick ‘welcome home’ text and got on with my day. I like that experience a lot.

The applications and the app shopping experience? Well. Let me just say that if you were on that internal Vodafone committee, don’t expect a whopping bonus at Christmas. Navigating to buy (or browse) applications is excruciating. Think 1997 WAP with colour pictures. But we’ll get to that in more detail soon, perhaps in this week’s newsletter.

I shall have more 360 experiences for you shortly.

Posted via email from MIR Live