Vodafone 360 Samsung H1 review

In the same way as contacts, messaging is also overhauled in the 360 view, although this time it's a little easier to explain thanks to the likes of the HTC Hero and Motorola Dext offering similar options.

Basically all of your emails, texts and chats are available to be seen grouped together in one place, along with your calling log and history with that person too.

So if you enter their contact profile on the Samsung H1, then you can see all the messages you've exchanged through an easy to scroll through system, along with the web accounts you have linked with that person.

This means you can easily send a message or chat to that person from the contact page – but there's more on offer in the dedicated email and messaging tiles on the applications page.

Email

Vodafone's making a big deal about email as part of the 360 service, and it's another element that you can aggregate into the experience on the website.

However, it's not quite up to speed as yet, and the elements that are working are pretty convoluted at the moment.

Once you set up your accounts from the webpage, they eventually appear on as part of the email inbox – however, we set up our Hotmail, and Googlemail accounts, and only Hotmail started receiving emails instantly.

Gmail waited a day before deciding to play ball (although we could send email, we could not receive it), but instead of just sending us the messages, it decided to give us all our Googlemail folders (Bin, Spam, Sent, and so on, as well as Inbox) which made the list look cluttered.

And we're still waiting for Yahoo to activate – no word on whether that will ever happen as yet.

Of course, you do get your own '@360.com' email address as well – you'll probably be unsurprised to learn that this works just fine right out the box.

Another annoying element is that there's no 'download all' element to the mails, meaning that whenever you want to read a message you have to wait for the phone to download it, which often takes up to seven or eight seconds.

Also deleting emails, using the checkbox to select those we wanted to get rid of, was annoying, as trying to select more than five meant that the application crashed and we had to exit it to keep using the phone.

Texting

Messaging on the Samsung H1 is a pretty natural experience, with threaded messages, options to directly send messages from a contact's profile and simple options to turn an SMS into a fully fledged MMS.

However, it would be fair to say we're underwhelmed by the on screen QWERTY keyboard – HTC level of intuition it is not, with fairly inaccurate typing recognition and only word suggestions, not auto correction.

This means that you have to move the finger to select the word you're looking for, rather than being able to type freely, safe in the knowledge that whatever you write is being checked over.

The same is true when it comes to punctuation, as the comma and full stop keys are hidden within the symbol section, meaning another two button presses are needed to be grammatically correct.

However, one thing we do like is the integration of text messages into the history when pressing the phone dialler – as we've said we're big fans of the 3D interface and it's nice to not only look at a boring list of phone calls we've made and missed.

This leads us back to the obvious question we raised in the earlier section – why is Facebook limited to just a list of statuses, with the aggravation of having to link them all together?

Surely, like the Motorola Dext and INQ Mini 3G you should be able to send a message to your buddies directly from the contact screen – or at the very least from somewhere on the phone.

When Twitter is added in, what will happen then? Will it just be a list of people that you follow and the odd thing that they say? We hope this is something that Vodafone/Samsung updates with a future firmware release.