Vodafone 360 pollutes pristine HTC Legend - Crave at CNET UK
Vodafone 360 pollutes pristine HTC Legend
By Flora Graham on 15 March 2010, 2:54pm
We're already drooling over the HTC Legend, the Android smart phone sensation that's coming exclusively to Vodafone when it launches. But we're not so hungry for Voda's special sauce of Vodafone 360, which is going to be poured all over the Legend's deliciousness.
Vodafone 360 is a cloud-based service that offers to sync your contacts and photos from your phone to the Web. It also has a music store, an app store, and a browser home page portal that you can customise with links and widgets.
The Legend already has the HTC Sense user interface, which includes a single inbox for your Gmail and Facebook contacts, and a friend stream app that brings your tweets and status updates together in one widget. Android's App Market is second only to the Apple App Store for choice. So what's the point of adding Vodafone 360, another social-netwoking aggregator that's differentiated only by the lack of interest anyone has in using it?
Vodafone 360 was launched on two flagship phones -- the Samsung H1 and the Samsung M1 -- and various other phones support apps that give access to some parts of the service. But, like Nokia's Ovi thingumajig, it's failed to make much of an impression because of its lack of features compared to other social networks and its inability to share data outside of its own walled garden.
It's unclear whether Vodafone 360 on the HTC Legend will be just pre-installed apps, or whether it will be embedded in the operating system at a deeper level -- or whether users can remove the service if they don't want it.
"The Legend will come pre-loaded with a range of Vodafone 360 services, including Vodafone Music and MyWeb, sitting on top of the HTC Sense user interface," said Vodafone in a press release. The phone will still have full access to the Android App Market.
Vodafone demonstated an app for the Android operating system, which only connects the address book part of Vodafone 360, in February at Mobile World Congress.
We're waiting to hear from Vodafone about the extent of Vodafone 360's infiltration on our current smart phone crush, and we'll update this story as soon as we have more information. The phone will be available in April.
lets hope this isnt true as i was seriously considering moving over to vodafone and getting either the legend or the desire, but if they are going to overlay their own 360 then ill seriously re consider it, one of the main reasons for me wanting the desire apart from it being a well specd phone was the sense UI that i wanted to use.
I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens when its released wont we
