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Exclusive: The Vodafone 360 Samsung H2 roars into view – photos, video

There’s been a lot of inaccurate speculation across the web about the upcoming Samsung H2 handset for the Vodafone 360 service. I’ve been briefed directly by Vodafone and I’m pleased to correct the speculation with these official specifications:

Height: 125mm

Width: 60.8mm

Depth: 11.7mm (smaller than the H1)

Weight: 137g

Memory: 16GB internal, MicroSD for another 32GB supported

Data speeds/Support: HSDPA 7.2/HSUPA 5.76/UMTS/GSM Quad/WiFi 802.11n/Bluetooth 3.0

Screen: 3.7″ widescreen, multi-touch Super AMOLED WVGA (800X480)

Video supported: H.263, H.264, MPEG4, DivX, WMV, and AC3

Sensors: Geo-magnetic, Proximity, Accelerometer, Light

Camera: 8MP Autofocus and Image Stabilizer camera with 4X digital zoom and LED flash – 720p HD video recording

Chipse: QCOM MSM 6290 and SEC S5PC111 (1GHz) app proc – hardware support for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration

Browser: Opera 10 with Flash, Webkit 3.2 Widget Engine and IBM4 J9 Java with multitasking support

Linux3 developer SDK available for native apps on LiMo

I’ve had hands-on with the phone for about 30 minutes and I can tell you that the device itself is an absolute delight. It’s modern, rounded, sleek, very zippy and it makes excellent use of the fast chipset and the graphics acceleration. Swapping between applications and services is smooth and fast. The Vodafone 360 proprietary social tools (the little profile squares, if you remember them) run really, really nicely. Plus the touchscreen is much more reliable.

And what about some pictures?

And did you say video?

I am a lot happier with the Samsung H2 than I was with the H1 — it really is a super flagship device for the 360 range — but I’m most impressed at the changes the 360 team have obviously been working on. But more on that soon.

Note: Expect to hear more news about the Samsung H2 as we get further into Q3.

13 COMMENTS

  1. I am not having a dig, and I fully appreciate that 30 minutes is no where near enough to get stuck into the details, but I have a question.

    In that short video you pressed a button and went to what you called the “home screen” yet to me it looked like the applications folder. So my question is in two parts. (a) Is the “home screen” really just full of those boxes? and (b) Can you make folders to separate out those three (it looked like three, maybe two and half) screens of applications?

    Elisa here in Finland are Vodafone partners and have carried Vodafone branded phones before and while they were quick to say that they would not be supporting the H1 I have seen nothing about the H2 either way! So I am hoping it might show up, because if nothing else I want to compare this to the N8!

  2. This is the handset we're talking about Tim… I generally only had good things to say about the original H1. It's when I got to the actual service that I started banging my head on the desk repeatedly.

  3. Hi Ewan,

    I really hope, that LiMo R3 of the H2 is much better than the LiMo OS on H1 & M1. Because I have the Samsung M1 and it’s bugg. But in 30 minutes you could’t test all functions of the H2! Did you connect to other 360 contacts? Or configured your Email-Account? Or imported/exported contacts from/to other phones via bluetooth?

  4. Gareth, the applications folder you saw is indeed the home screen of the phone. You can move the icons around — and I *think* you can do folders, I just haven't tried that on the H2 myself yet.

  5. Aldebaran, I was in the room for about 30 minutes with it but I only actually was able to play with it for about 2 minutes or so — which is why I couldn't give you any more than a quick video and some photos at the moment.

  6. How work multitasting? multiple Java apps? Is there available SDK for native apps? Could you compare screen to H1 (contrast in day light, etc.)?

  7. My wife is using a H1. Camera and videogames are fantastic, hardware is below average but the system itself is completely crappy.
    From the video I can see they didn't change much there, it could be snappier, but still completely user-unfriendly.
    Just an example: after 2 months she still hasn't a clue on what is the order of the contacts and how's supposed to work the browsing in pseudo 3d (the one you showed in the video at sec.15). She switched to plain contact list and that's it. Also the main home has lots of squares with more or less same colors, very hard to find commons applications.

  8. Uberto, the order in the 3d contacts view is supposed to be “social distance” – i.e. an algorithm that calculates how frequently you contact that said person over a 7 and 30 day period. The more frequent, the more to the front they should be. In theory.

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