Vodafone has told TechRadar that it plans to offer elements of its 360 service to other operating systems, which will include submitting its application portal for use on the iPhone.
Speaking to Bobby Rao, Marketing Director for Vodafone internet services, he confirmed to us that the network will be looking to get elements of the new 360 service onto other platforms, including the iPhone and Android.
"It's our plan to submit elements to the App Store, such as Maps, People and whatever else they choose to accept.
"The most seamless experience will be available on Vodafone handsets, but we want a broad variety of platforms, such as Android and others."
All about numbers
When quizzed about Vodafone's Shop application portal and how the network plans to make it a success in an ever more crowded market, Rao point to the subscriber base that it (along with partners China Mobile, Softbank and Verizon) has to work with:
"With Shop, we can get it onto a wide variety of handsets, and we can also embed 360 services. If you look at the iPhone [and iPod touch] there are maybe 30-40 million of these in the market.
"If you combine our subscriber base, we have around one billion subscribers, and we don't need a large portion of them to achieve a meaningful scale."
Rao also pointed out that other manufacturers already working with the network are keen to take 360 and Vodafone Shop on board:
"We already have agreements in place with several handset manufacturers [to offer 360 services], which are data compatible but not all on an open OS. Plus being able to access the Shop on things like S60 devices extends the reach [of the portal]."
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tonyreilly
November 10th 2009
1. HA!
Vodafone should concentrate on getting the sham of a 360 service working first!
The handset (Samsung H1) and the website are not doing what the service is all about... syncing!
I've not had an email or Facebook status update for over 6 days now! Not a very good start to the service. The handset is also very buggy and some of the more advanced features leave a lot to be desired (namely the calendar and email clients!)
Hey Vodafone (and not Uk, and not Ireland, Vodafone Global), any change of getting this sorted? No one seems to be able to answer a simple question or even acknowledge that there is a fix in the works!! It's not just me either, check out the VF UK forums and the VF 360 forums. People giving out live crazy over sync issues and other pretty fundamental bugs / issues!
What started off soo good and with soo much promise has quite quickly fallen apart and unless something is done fast (and someone says its being done) then they may as well kiss this 360 service goodbye!
Techradar, if anyone from Vodafone wants to get in touch with me, please go ahead and give them my contact email.
I know that was a bit of rant, but just REALLLY frustrated now with the lack of info coming from Vodafone regarding these issues.
Tony.
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