Vodafone promises 700+ apps on 360 launch

Rating: Biggest shock is that V 360 is cross handset platform and cross network

An ambitious plan to have at least 700 mobile applications up and running for the launch of Vodafone 360 was revealed yesterday [28th October 2009]. This contrasts sharply with the 243 apps which were purportedly available for the release of the first Windows Phone handsets.

Mysteriously, Vodafone has played down the fact that the first ever 360 handsets, the Samsung H1 and forthcoming Samsung M1 models, are the first to run release 2 of the Limo Foundation ’s Open Source/Linux based mobile OS. (See GoMo News passim).

GoMo News suspects this is because the company wants the focus to be on its freshly released software services - not on the handsets themselves. Even if they are funky, touch-screen devices.

When the H1 goes on sale on 30th October, it won’t be pre-loaded with a Twitter app. A Vodafone spokesperson hinted to GoMo News that this is more a question of dotting all the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s, rather than a software development delay.

GoMo News was delighted to discover that Vodafone fully intends to make its APIs free available ASAP. Even those which cover its location based (LBS) and billing apps. That’s quiet unusual. The company is also promising spiffing SDKs, too. The claim is that Java J2ME apps will be easy to port, too. The biggest shock that cross handset platform but cross network, too. Vodafone seems to have kept that one quiet as well.

As an example of an app which takes advantage of the LBS capabilities of 360 handsets, a Vodafone spokesman revealed how it would be feasible to monitor just how many 360 subscribers had walked past a particular location. That location could be a bill-board, for example, so it would be feasible to build statistics on how many people had been exposed to a particular advert.

Vodafone’s policy of vetting apps for distribution via 360 will be rather strict, but the hint here is that this is more to do with maintaining quality and avoiding illegal content rather than any desire to retain absolute power.

For handset fans, the M1 appears to be simply a cut down version of the H1. Minus Wi-Fi, for example. Wisely with the emphasis on music with the H1, Vodafone revealed that it will ship with 16 GB of onboard memory with the option to add up to an 8GB card.