The multi-touch craze is heating up as O2 today announced that the carrier will start offering the Palm Pre on October 16. However, the surprising news today comes from Vodafone, which reveals its new Vodafone 360 service as well as the Samsung H1 phone manufactured by Samsung. The new service will be launched first in eight European countries by Christmas, and in addition to two tailor-made Samsung phones (H1 and M1), four Nokia S60 phones will come pre-loaded with the Vodafone 360 services.
Vodafone 360 service
Vodafone 360 is a brand new set of internet services for the mobile and PC which aims to gather all of a customer's friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites (like music, games, photos and video) in one place.
At its heart Vodafone 360 has a address book that brings together all of the contacts from the mobile phone, social networks and other internet accounts. This connected address book, called Vodafone People, will support any network across over 100 popular mobile phones. It automatically synchronizes all contacts from a customer's phone, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk, and will soon also include Twitter, Hyves and studiVZ. It also synchronizes automatically with the customer's PC.
Vodafone 360 will also let users keep track of Facebook status updates, share locations, as well as tagging and sharing pictures and favorite places.
Vodafone 360 will also include a range of apps, games, music and mapping services that will be accessible on multiple handsets as well as PC or Mac. Additionally, the service will let users create different contact groups across social media networks, and manage how they share different information with different groups.
The new Vodafone 360 suite of services will first launch in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK later this year. In 2010 a number of other countries will follow, including India, Turkey, South Africa, New Zealand and Romania. Furthermore, the service will launch in France through SFR, through MTS in Russia, and through Vodafone Hutchison Australia.
Samsung H1 and M1 touchscreen phones
Two tailor-made Vodafone 360 mobile handsets, manufactured by Samsung, is promised to give the best customer experience of the services including a unique 3D contacts display, driven by Vodafone's "proximity algorithm", bringing the most frequently contacted people closer to the front. The Samsung H1 is the first handset, while a second handset by Samsung will be announced soon, the Samsung M1.
The key specifications of the Samsung H1 include a 3.5-inch multi-touch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 800 by 480 pixels (WVGA), 16GB (or 8GB) memory, microSD memory slot, Wi-Fi, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and a talk time of 6.5 hours. According to Samsung, the phone will also offer 720p HD video recording. The Samsung H1 is powered by a TI OMAP 3430 600 MHz application processor (based on the high-end ARM Cortex-A8 processor used in for instance the iPhone 3GS and Nokia N900).
The Samsung H1 also sports a 3.5mm headset jack, FM radio with RDS, and Bluetooth 2.0. Wireless connectivity includes GSM Quad-band, UMTS 900/2100 MHz (Asia, Europe), HSDPA 7.2 Mbps, 5.6 Mbps HSUPA as well as GPRS/EDGE.
When it comes to browsing capabilities, the Samsung H1 offers full internet browsing courtesy of Opera 9.6 and flash player support. The phone also offers 2D and 3D hardware graphics acceleration like the iPhone 3GS and Nokia N900. Additionally, the Samsung H1 supports a wide range of audio and video formats for multimedia playback, including (e)AAC(+), MP3, WMA, SP-Midi, XMF, AMR, SMF for audio, and H.263, H.264, MPEG4, DivX for video. The phone also supports H.263, H.264 and MPEG4 video streaming.
In the messaging department, the Samsung H1 will not offer Exchange support, but should offer SMS, MMS, Email (IMAP4) supporting OMA Push Email, as well as Instant messaging (Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk). The phone weighs in at 134 g and measures 115.8 by 58 by 12.9 mm.
The Samsung H1 and M1 are both expected to hit store shelves in late 2009.
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