It’s been well over a week since I got my hands on the Vodafone Blue 555 “Facebook” phone, and it’s time I thought I should pen down my views about this latest attempt by Vodafone to cash in on the Facebook fever sweeping the country.
The Facebook phenomenon
Let’s put some numbers in here to make the review a tad more interesting. Microsoft’s recent Living With the Internet Study highlighted India’s love for social networking. Also, India, over the past few years has become a nation obsessed with Facebook. While, Orkut ruled the roost say until about late 2008-09, it’s been a Facebook story ever since. As of now, India has over 25 million active Facebook users (some figures say 35 million), and this is a number that’s fast growing. With a burgeoning population of 1.2 billion, and almost 65% of them under the age of 35, Facebook probably sees India as THE most important market for them demographically.
With a majority of these youngsters using mobile phones, it was natural that Facebook would chose this way to penetrate even those sections of the society who would love to be a part of the Facebook phenomenon but can’t do so because of the prohibitive cost of the hardware (PC’s, laptops) needed to access it.
Enter the Vodafone Blue 555. Touted as an official Facebook phone, the device aims to bridge the digital divide and let people with limited access to Facebook access the features of the site at minimal cost. Let’s check out the handset now.
Look and Feel
The Blue 555 is a handsome little phone – no doubt about that. The body is made of plastic of which the front fascia looks quite upmarket with its matte silver finish. The rear cover though could have been better – but then, for the price at which this one would retail, we are not complaining. The lower half of the front is dominated by the full-fledged QWERTY keypad. The keys are raised quite a bit and once you get used to it, you will love typing away on it.
Above the keypad are the call, receive and end buttons on the extreme right and left sides respectively. Next to each of them are the option and menu keys. At the centre, the phone has a Blackberry’esque optical trackpad thingy. It was a little tricky to use the phone at the beginning because I was used to the options key at the extreme ends of normal handsets – but then it takes only a few hours to get used to it. The phone sports a 3.5 mm audio jack at the top. Apart from the volume rocker keys and a micro USB port, the phone doesn’t have any other buttons on the sides.
At the rear, there is a camera with an LED flash supporting it for low light imaging. There is a blue LED light at the top which lights up to notify you about missed calls and text messages. The phone is a 12 mm thick and weighs next to nothing. My trouser pockets used to the heavyweight Nokia E7 was more than happy welcoming the Blue in to him.
Features
The Vodafone Blue 555 is a decently spec’d handset. But it misses quite a few features we would have loved to see on this. To start with, the phone does not support 3G networks, and you would be limited to EDGE speeds only even if you live in an area with 3G coverage. I am unsure how much of a price difference it would have made had Vodafone/Alcatel thought of integrating a 3G chip inside this one but somehow, I am forced to think it would have been better if it had one. The second one is support for Wi-Fi – but then that’s asking for too much from a sub Rs.5000 phone and can be excused.
The phone has a 2.4 inch QVGA LCD display which I should say is quite decent. At full brightness, the display is vibrant and readable. Obviously, its hard pleasing someone who has been on devices like the iPhone 4 or a Galaxy S II, but for its price, the display is not bad at all. Also, let’s not forget that Vodafone is not really behind the iPhone toting crowd with this device. Apart from the dedicated F Button (I like that name!) on the keypad, the phone also gets shortcuts for launching the camera app, locking the phone and putting the phone on silent mode.
The phone has a 200 MHZ processor powering it and for the same reason, you will find the device lagging quite a bit at times. It could get irritating at times – but usually, a restart should help fix things.
The Facebook Experience
Being THE Facebook phone, it was obvious that we would be doing this section. From the moment you power on the device for the first time, it’s an all-encompassing Facebook experience. Even the boot up screen looks like a Facebook ‘loading’ signal. Once powered on, it will ask you for your Facebook ID and password using which you login. The first few minutes would be used to set up your account and sync your contacts. You can also skip all these things to use the device like any other normal phone.
The phone has a menu that’s fairly easy to navigate. There is a bar at the bottom where you can assign shortcuts to the most used applications. The Facebook themed interface is pretty easy to use. The phone has a very nice integrated, tabbed messaging menu that groups your emails, SMS’ and Facebook messages under one menu option. Except for say watching videos and play games, the phone allows you to do everything you can on the full-fledged version of the website. For most users, this should be enough. Even Facebook Chat is supported. There is a separate chat client if you prefer chatting with buddies on other networks. The phone allows uploading of pictures directly from phone. The only issue here would be the rather slow upload times because it only supports EDGE networks.
Internet
The phone uses Opera Mini 5 as the default browser. Heavily customized by Vodafone, it does allow the phone to browse almost all websites out there. It also supports tabbed browsing. If you are not happy with just one browser, you are free to install the one of your choice because the device supports a host of Java applications.
Calling
Let’s all not forget that, at the end of the day, this one is still a mobile phone. To start with, I used the phone with my Airtel SIM card since I unfortunately did not have a Vodafone connection. However, Vodafone has not decided to lock the phone to their network which I think is surely a good idea While it took some time for me to set up the phone for Airtel Internet, it wasn’t much of a problem.
The phone has decent reception and voice quality. The volume level on the earpiece is sufficient for you to converse even in crowded environments. There is a loudspeaker at the back of the phone which is decent for playing back music. On a call, however, I found that the volume of the loudspeaker on the lower side. You will have a hard time conversing on the loudspeaker if you are in a noisy area. The phone has an integrated contacts list where you can merge the phone numbers of your friends with their Facebook ID’s. The merged contacts also give you an option to select your favorite contacts so you can access their Facebook details or make a call to them quickly.
Multimedia
The Vodafone Blue is a moderately multimedia capable handset. It has a 2 megapixel camera at the rear with an LED flash. The camera takes pretty ordinary pictures – even by 2 megapixel standards. But then, these are good for quick pictures that you might want to upload to Facebook immediately. The Flash is insufficient to light up an entire room, but is useful if you are capturing an image of something close by. If you are done with taking pictures let us also tell you that the phone has a video mode too and captures 3GP videos . I was surprised to find that the phone supports digital zoom. The zoom function is however, very laggy, and it takes almost 25 seconds and a lot of effort pressing the volume keys to do so.
The music player looks decent – although the music playing capability could have been better. There is an FM radio thrown in as well which youngsters in India would appreciate. You can also record from the FM radio. The supplied headphones are decent for the price and fit well in my ears although users with small ears may find it slightly difficult (not that I am particularly big eared!). The phone comes with 40 MB of internal memory which is certainly not sufficient these days. We would have loved if Vodafone also bundled the handset with at least a 2GB memory.
Battery Life
Vodafone claims that the phone is good for three hours of talk time and 324 hours of standby time. While we are yet to verify the talk time, let us assure you that the phone is capable of lasting a day on full charge IF you do not remain connected to the Internet all day long. The 1000 mAH battery surely helps with this. One thing I noticed with the phone given to us was an issue with the phone going in to a demo mode of sorts (wherein it displays its features in the form of a screensaver) after I keep it idle for some time.
This resulted in the phone display remaining on for hours and thereby eating up battery life. We did take the issue up with Vodafone and they are investigating. I did not find a way to turn it off for some reason. If anyone else is facing this issue and have managed to fix it, you might as well let us know in the comments!
Quick Video Review
Verdict
Vodafone had launched this phone globally back in July 2011 and while it doesn’t make sense in European countries where they have widespread 3G coverage, in a country like in India, there is undoubtedly a market for this. With Vodafone offering a years’ worth of Facebook usage with the handset, teens short on cash will surely find the handset lucrative and as a means to be “on” Facebook even if they don’t have a PC around. Even if you remove the Facebook bit, let us remind you that the device is a decent handset for its price which currently hovers around the Rs.4600 mark in the market. At launch, the device was priced at Rs. 4950.
The Vodafone Blue 555 seems to be a perfect handset for someone who likes to be on Facebook all the time – say a perfect birthday gift as a first phone. But if your expectations are anything more than that, you will come out disappointed. The bad bits include lack of 3G, no memory card supplied, laggy UI and a very ordinary camera.
That said, the Vodafone Blue is actually quite decent alternative to unbranded, unsafe handsets that proliferate the Indian market and is recommended either as a secondary handset or as a fist phone for a youngster. We hope Vodafone comes up with a higher end version if the same phone with smartphone abilities so that it can stand up to the likes of the HTC ChaCha – the other contender for the title of the King of Facebook phones. That one however is in an entirely different price segment.
