Samsung H1 review

Samsung has joined forces with Vodafone on this handset (and its cheaper cousin, the M1) to produce a phone with networking at its core, and in Voafone 360, a potentially all-encompassing service that consolidates all your contact details from every social networking source. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a very promising peek at the future of mobile phones.

Handset

The Samsung H1 is a solid if not particularly stylish handful in brushed chrome-look plastic, though it’s blocky lines are offset a little by its curved back. At 116mm x 58mm x 13mm and 134g it’s a fair size, in part to accommodate the 3.5in screen, though still reasonably lightweight. Despite its thin plastic casing it doesn’t feel cheap.

Beneath the screen are three hard buttons for calls, contacts and menu. It’s a slightly unusual layout, but as we’ll see, it’s crucial to the usage of the phone. There’s a volume rocker and micro USB power/sync slot with slide cover on one side and camera shutter and bright red search key (for phone and Internet) on the other. At the top there’s a power/screen lock key and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Screen

The screen is a largish 3.5in OLED, on a par with the iPhone for size, but perhaps a notch above it for sharpness and clarity. It looks terrific and it’s capacitive, rather than resistive, which is always welcome, but in terms of sensitivity it’s not quite up there with the best from Apple, HTC or Palm, and we sometimes had to make several presses on the onscreen buttons before they were accepted.

Interface and operating system

The operating system is based on LiMo (Linux Mobile) but it’s been heavily customised to integrate it with Vodafone 360, a free integrated social networking service that pulls together all your contacts and networking apps.

You can sign up to Vodafone 360 via the phone or online at www.360.com. Once you’re in, you can log on to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and others (but not Twitter yet, though apparently it’s coming) and merge your contacts’ details from each of your social networking apps into one contact card. Some functions require your friends to sign up to Vodafone 360, but fortunately, they don’t have to be Vodafone users to do so, which at least shows that Vodafone is thinking ahead.

Oddly though, you can’t update your Facebook from the handset, just see other people’s updates, which rather seems to be missing the point. Instant messaging seemed to work fine though, with contacts who’re online highlighted in green, and you can chat to them both through the phone and the 360 website.

The interface can be a little hard to get your head around, but full marks to Samsung and Vodafone for trying something genuinely new. Pressing the phone button reveals a page showing a card for each of your most recent calls (and texts, and emails, though you can apply filters to make them easier to sort, which is just as well, since the flood of info can be a little overwhelming), including photos if you have them, floating on the screen. You can swipe up to reveal more, or simply press the calls button again to show them as a list.

The contacts section is arranged in the same way, and you can switch between the cascading cards and a list by pressing the contacts button again. You can also sort your contacts into a variety of different groups to help you manage them.

The menu button brings up a list of apps represented by iPhone-style tiles, with more available from the ‘Shop’. Again there’s a new element here, with some apps capable of expanding on the apps screen (such as AccuWeather) without having to leave the apps screen. There’s not a whole lot going on in the Shop just yet, but Vodafone is clearly ambitious for it, announcing that it plans to launch a downloadable 360 app for other phones later.

Browser

The browser is a good one with onboard accelerometer flipping the screen into landscape mode to render web pages better, and there’s a ‘press-to-zoom’ function where you press and hold the screen to bring up a scroll bar which you can move up or down to zoom in or out. You can also hold your finger down to bring up sharing options allowing you to send the page or just its URL by text or email.
It supports multi windows, you can save pages for viewing offline, and the onscreen keyboard proved to be pleasingly accurate, with iPhone-style flags appearing as you hit the keys, supported by haptic feedback.

Camera

The 5 megapixel camera isn’t the quickest to launch (about five seconds), but it comes with a clutch of extras including autofocus, anti-shake, LED flash, smile detection, multi-shot and timer. Picture quality is generally very good too, with mostly sharp lines and well rendered colours. Video recording proved to be a bit of a surprise, since the H1 can handle 720p HD recording – something you’ll find on Samsung’s 8-megapixel i8910 and very few other camphones. No, it’s not as good as the equivalent on a dedicated camcorder, but it’s several notches above other camphones for clarity, depth and sharpness.

Media

Films look great on the bright and superbly sharp OLED screen. Music too is well served and has the added advantage of Vodafone Music, the big red one’s equivalent of Nokia Music, which for £5 a month allows you to download an unlimited amount of DRM-ed music. Plus there’s an FM radio too.

Sound quality through the supplied headphones is less than stellar, but at least there’s a 3.5mm headhone jack and stereo Bluetooth to allow for easy upgrade. There’s a hefty 16GB of memory on board too, which will be enough for most, but no option to add more via microSD card.

Battery

The battery holds up fairly well on the H1, and it gave us a good day and a half of fairly heavy use.

Vodafone and Samsung have obviously been thinking hard about this new social networking thingummy and taken a first step towards the next generation of mobile phones. It’s not a perfect solution (there’s no Twitter app yet for goodness’ sake!), but it’s already ahead of what’s being offered by most other manufacturers and networks, who seem to think bunging a Facebook or Twitter app on the menu is enough. Then again, if you’re not much of a virtual social butterfly, you won’t have much need for it, though the bright OLED screen, 5 megapixel camera, HSDPA 3G, A-GPS and WiFi might tempt you.