When you turn the phone on, this is the screen you are greeted with. Your contacts are displayed in "3D" which of course isn't 3 dimensions but is pretty cool first time. Unfortunately, it lacks functionality because the contacts are not arranged alphabetically so if you have more than a dozen or so contacts (like most people) then you might be flicking through for ages to find the desired contact.
Of course you can arrange them in regular 2D fashion. This way it is very easy to scroll through your contacts. Either by simply scrolling using the capacitive screen, or by letter at the side which I must admit to being a bit fiddly as your finger covers it so you can't always make out what you're doing. You can access these contacts by pressing the middle of the 3 hard keys at the bottom. And to switch between 2D and 3D just press the button and it switches. You can sync your contacts up with facebook, which gives you their profile pic, latest status update and mobile number, email address and all that info stuff. I don’t do it because it wears down the battery and I’d rather keep phoning and facebooking separate.
The left hard key takes you to the sort of communication screen. You can edit this to show everything which is emails, texts, missed calls, dialled calls etc. One niggles is that it can’t be for all calls, just specific types of calls. Again, you can press the hard key again to toggle between 2D and 3D for your personal preferences. As with the contacts, function wins over for me and I keep them both in 2D.
The apps screen is very reminiscent of a certain iPhone's. You see around 20 to a screen but it isn't like the iPhone's that you scroll through screens, you just flick through the one main screen. The apps (Weather and Twitta) that have the slight white triangle bottom right are widgets which can remain open all the time. You can have 3 widgets running constantly at once, beats a certain competitor? Like with all hard key screens, you can toggle between 3D and 2D by pressing the button (the right hard key) but this time I prefer the 3D as it allows you to choose how the apps are arranged by pressing the pencil button top right. At any one time, whether you're in an app or not, if you press the time then it shows you the app toggler. As this phone multitasks, you can, say, change the track and put the phone into silent and turn off wifi whilst pausing Asphalt 4 which came with the game.
Texts are arranged into a nice conversation list which allows you to see what you were talking about before you make a reply. Unfortunately, to make your reply to the text you need to go through 2 screens before typing instead of just tapping an icon which takes you straight there. A thumbs down there I'm afraid. When you receive a text message notification, the phone also lights up white at the bottom which is annoying and battery draining if you don't check it instantly as you might do if you were in a busy place and didn't hear it or the phone were on silent mode.
Finally, the unlock screen. Look familiar? If I were at Samsung HQ and Vodafone I would be worried about a certain fruit manufacturer coming after me with patent infringements and what not. However, it is functional and beats the iPhone which it is surely based on. It also says if you have a missed call/text so you can just press any hard key to access the screen and see if you've missed the latest word.
Overall, the interface on the Samsung H1 does take some getting used to. However, it is a glorious piece of design and I thoroughly recommend it to you if you want a decent phone which isn't too expensive. More of this review to come, so stay tuned for that.
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