It’s lonely out there in Vodafone 360 world

Rating: Waiting for Vodo to launch more 360 clients

One of the benefits of Vodafone’s new 360 service is that you can keep track of what your chums are up to. There’s only one snag. At present the only mates you can track directly are other owners of the Samsung H1 360 phone.

GoMo News doublechecked this point with the 360 support team and indeed no software clients for other phones have been released yet. But they did very usefully point out that you can register your interest here.

Judging from the form, the 360 service is presently only available in the UK, too. So in effect, if you want to chat and see who is online then you stuck with the 360 service.

Which is a bit strange because you can actually sign yourself up to both Windows Live email and Facebook with the H1 handset, for example.

Hence, all of your friends from Facebook (along with their pictures) will appear in you contacts book. This is really quite useful.

Plus – in terms of status – the H1 handset will show you which of your contacts has most recently updated their facebook status (and what they said). That’s good too.

For some reason, however, the H1 doesn’t seem to register who is online amongst your friends via your Windows Live account.

Nonetheless, GoMo News did successfully sent an email from its Windows Live account using the H1 rather than having to use the 360 mail service.

To date, we have been able to at least locate some apps that should get us onto Twitter via the Vodafone ‘Shop’. The one we tried isn’t very user-friendly, though.

Rather disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be a Skype client for the H1 yet - which is a shame because Skype’s IM service is highly rated.

If anybody else out there is struggling to test Vodafone 360, they could always try to chat with me – ‘tonethefone’ or try my email which is tonethefone@360.com.

Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran journalist he writes on the UK market…. contact him here mailto:tony@mobileinsight.co.uk