Vodafone 360

~ the obituary ~

Every operator in every country spent the 2000s trying to be the layer above the phone rather than the wire underneath it, including the ones i have paid bills to. Vodafone 360 was the last serious attempt at it in Europe, and it arrived roughly two years after the argument had been settled.

It was announced in September 2009 and went on sale that November. The centerpiece was called People, a contact list that reached into Facebook and Windows Live and merged everything it found into the address book on the handset, so that a person existed once instead of four times. Around it sat Shop, which was Vodafone's app store, and a music service.

Two handsets were built for it, the H1 and the M1, both made by Samsung and both running LiMo, the Linux-based mobile platform that a consortium of operators and manufacturers had been assembling as an answer to the companies that had already won. About 300,000 of them sold. That figure was reported as a disappointment at the time and reads worse now, because Vodafone had roughly 300 million customers.

The thing 360 was actually competing for was ownership of your identity on the device. Vodafone's argument was reasonable on paper: the operator already knows who you call and already bills you monthly, so it could plausibly hold the master copy of your social life. The counter-argument was that Apple had shipped the App Store in July 2008 and Google was giving Android away, so the layer was gone before Vodafone reached for it.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

The software was slow and the hardware was not competitive, which is a bad combination when the alternative is sitting in the same shop. LiMo never got the developers it needed. By July 2010, ten months after launch, Vodafone had stopped developing dedicated 360 handsets and was instead pushing the service onto Android phones, where users who had bought an Android specifically to escape operator software reacted about how you would expect.

There was also the structural problem that killed every operator portal. Vodafone runs different companies in different countries with different handset lineups, so a service that had to be identical everywhere in order to be worth building was in practice negotiated market by market.

~ the day it died ~

Vodafone confirmed the closure in October 2011 and the integrated services stopped at the end of December. Shop and Music were kept alive under their own separate names, which tells you which parts had customers. What went away was the connective part: the People service and the email accounts attached to it. Anyone whose contacts lived only inside 360 had to get them out first.

~ what carried over ~

LiMo did not survive either. It was merged into the Linux Foundation's mobile work in 2011 and came out the other side as Tizen, which Samsung still uses on televisions and watches, so the platform outlived the service that was supposed to prove it.

The idea itself keeps coming back in weaker forms. Carriers still ship a preinstalled portal and still want the account to be the phone number rather than the email address. What is gone is the belief that any of it could be the main screen.

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