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JIL appears on Voda "social" phone from Samsung

They are calling it "the social networking phone." Vodafone's new phone, the Samsung H1 – shipping this Friday – is an Internet phone. It's "the first to have social networking brought to the handset wherever you are" – with the new Vodafone 360 Internet package.

It's also the first look at JIL, the appstore created by the Joint Innovation Lab set up by four operators around the world - China Mobile, Softbank and Verizon Wireless as well as Vodafone.

Vodafone 360 is a free service with any "pay monthly" contract worth £35 or more per month. And as well as offering Facebook and MSN and several other networking services, it also makes a new promise: "Never lose another photograph!"

The service will eventually be available on all, or nearly all, Vodafone phones with a data plan. "You'll want a data plan," suggested Ian Shepherd [above, right] Consumer Director. "It uses data." And indeed, with a 5 megapixel camera on board, and every photo you take instantly "backed up" to the Internet, then limiting your costs to a maximum of £35 amonth would be a very sensible plan…  pay as you go pricing could get out of hand, quickly!

Vodafone launched this phone with a bit of crowing about how it was the only network with the wireless capacity to make this offer without fearing that the traffic would swamp them.

But most of its focus was on "your network, your contacts." Shepherd told our reporter: "We bring together all your phone books in one place."

Demonstrating, he showed his phone record of Tom Devine, sales director. "From here, I can call him, text him, email him, show him where I am with the 'compass' app, see his status on Facebook, or IM him on MSN, and even see his own contacts on Vodafone 360."

Twitter will be available "soon" but Shepherd wouldn't give a clue as to when he hoped it would be announced. We think it may even be working before the New Year.

You can examine the 360 concept already; it's on www.360.com from today (Thursday 29th October) and you can get the phone from tomorrow (Friday).

If you already have a Vodafone phone, for example a Symbian handset like the N85, then go look at its existing "Active Home Screen" feature - which you'll be able to upgrade to full Vodafone 360 "soon" (again!).

This isn't a Voda exclusive. "You don't have to be a Vodafone customer to use Vodafone 360," Shepherd insisted. "But if you want to have your social networking world with you when you're out and about, then we really recommend our data plan; this device will be updating itself and its various databases and status indicators all the time, over the air."

Existing customers will be able to move to V360 automatically; there will be a free download, and a "wizard" which takes you through it.

The Samsung H1, launched this week, will be the star phone for V360. Next will come the similar, but less "powerful" Samsung M1 – identical in what it does, but not as quick at doing it, and without the OLED colour display.

Other phones will be added to those which take this Internet software – including "soon" the iPhone… "we expect." No promises. Android? "Soon."

All Vodafone customers can use V360, but it will use data, a lot; and that could cost you. "But anybody paying £35 a month or more will get all the data free," Shepherd assured us.

First look at the Samsung was very brief, but samples will be going out for review on Friday.

It's a nice enough phone if you don't want a slide-out physical keyboard. Big touch-screen input, and three special buttons at the bottom for "phone", "people" and "apps" – and the JIL based appstore at Vodafone from which you can download free software, or buy paid-for apps. More about that another day; it's a joint venture appstore design, which other phone companies like China Mobile will use, too. Look for JIL for details.

We expect this Vodafone 360 software to evolve.

There are obvious errors already visible in our short hands-on session; for example, you can be "locked out" of your own Instant Messenger account by accident.

That's easy enough: - all you have to do is log into your 360 account on your computer at home, and then rush off to work without remembering to log out. Naturally, all Vodafone's internal testers avoided this mistake! – but you wouldn't bet on the rest of us being happy to pull this super social networker box out of the pocket and find it saying: "Sorry, account locked…"

Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a UK-only product. Most European territories will have Vodafone 360 available this year. Turkey, India, South Africa, New Zealand follow; France will get it through SFR, Russia will get it through MTS and Vodafone's joint venture with Hutchison will launch in Australia.

Other Messengers? For example, Skype IM? What about Yahoo Messenger? "Soon." But don't expect Skype voice calls to be sensible over 3G; it's not a product built into the network as it is with "3" Skype phones. It'll be a texting service only, except over WiFi.

And yes, the Samsung phone will have WiFi.