I've just landed in Rome and I'm delighted to have received this notification by text:

Welcome to ITALY. Vodafone Passport calls cost 75p per call + your home rate (including bundled mins) to make and receive. SMS's are 11p. Daily cost for data is up to £4.99inc vat per 25MB allowance. We'll text you before we charge you again. Call 4636 for free pricing info & 112 for emergency services.

I like the idea of being sent a text before I'm charged again. Good strategy Vodafone.

That's come around quick! It feels like only yesterday I was defending the SpinVox honour against the braying senior industry executives who'd only just begun chattering about The Register's expose. The chap from SpinVox -- occupying something like the COO position -- attempted a mild defense of the company whilst I jumped in and explained the bullshit I'd been fed over the years by SpinVox. The next few weeks were a rather interesting time in the company's history culminating in the utter, utter please-don't-even-think-about-us radio silence PR strategy. That hasn't, incidentally, stopped interested parties from emailing into MIR Towers each week asking if I'd heard the latest (followed by yet more shocking yet not surprising revelations).

So it was quite an explosive event back in August. This evening's event is set to be an interesting one, I'm sure. It's not 'for press', i.e. I'm not 'reporting' it, but I'll tell you how I get on without specifying identities.

I couldn't go on with the Vodafone 360 Samsung H1. I've had to change to my BlackBerry Bold this morning. This is a reflection on my requirements from a handset, not on the Samsung or Big Red's 360. I need a certain type of always-on messaging and I need my contatcs/calendar synched with Google. 360, of course, isn't aimed at me -- the confirmed mobile geek -- it's aimed squarely at the end consumer. The normob from Hartlepool.

I'm missing 360 already as I bash out this post. Let me tell you some more good things I've observed.

First, the battery is good. Very good. This is highly unusual in a touchscreen device. By the end of the day (I mean midnight) the battery still held about 65% charge. Nice. Enough to stretch well into the next day I'll warrant. Remember that the device is more or less always-on if you're connected to the Vodafone 360 service.

And it's 360 that I'm missing. This morning, for example, I picked up the Samsung and was immediately presented with the little square profile picture status update screen. I saw right away that my brother has just left JFK bound for London. I moved the squares around (the closest I've got to being Tom Cruise in Minority Report on a handset) and had a brief scan of some other status updates. I came back to my brother's image, tapped it and hit the message icon. I knocked out a quick 'welcome home' text and got on with my day. I like that experience a lot.

The applications and the app shopping experience? Well. Let me just say that if you were on that internal Vodafone committee, don't expect a whopping bonus at Christmas. Navigating to buy (or browse) applications is excruciating. Think 1997 WAP with colour pictures. But we'll get to that in more detail soon, perhaps in this week's newsletter.

I shall have more 360 experiences for you shortly.

On a tube train this morning I counted 17 people. 9 of whom were using an iPhone. I kid ye not. I counted.

Certainly not representative of the UK as a whole but indicative of the way things are going for London commuters.

I tried to take a snap of the iPhone user carriage, but an annoying woman kept glancing at me as I tried to get the right shot. She was doing that 'terrorist' frightened look at me. I reckon she was moments away from 'being assertive' so I put my phone down and started typing. She's still giving me a panicked look.

Just got this in from Orange. I asked them for news on today's launch:

Orange are delighted to reveal, that as of 4pm today Orange had sold more than 30,000 iPhones across the UK – smashing what we believe is the previously published first day sales records for a handset in the UK

I spent a bit of last night playing with the Samsung H1 360 device from Vodafone, thanks to David Marutiak (Voda's User Community Ambassador). It's been a thoroughly interesting experience.

The handset is gorgeous. Big. It's very big. But that's because you get a sumptuous touchscreen to play with. The handset reminds me a lot of Samsung's recent i8910 (S60) model. I have been thoroughly enjoying the bright pixels and the surprisingly responsive haptic-feedback user interface.

In the main, setup was seamless. That said, I ran into one or two screens where I didn't understand what I was meant to do. I filmed this a la the N900 videos I did recently. (You'll see me hesitating and getting the odd thing wrong). During setup and use, I found myself gravitating between two perspectives: -

1. Complete and utter shock that a mobile operator had got so much 'right'

2. Dismay at the occasional element that only a mobile operator committee could settle on

You'll see in my videos that I wasn't entirely comfortable during setup -- one of the most important experiences for the user. This is not because I was playing dumb, but because I wanted to get it 'right'. For instance after I'd created my 360 account, I had the option to .. Well... It was an entirely blank screen with what looked like a 'plus/add' option -- but there was also an arrow top right which I interpreted as 'advance to next step'. If it was me, I'd just choose one, knowing in the back of my mind that Voda would want me to add some services -- Facebook, for example. If it was a 23-year old girl operating the handset she'd have been entirely stumped and have to guess. All of a sudden her reationship with her device has changed to one where she's the confused user. Really bad in the iPhone world.

Once I'd added Facebook, I advanced to the next screen. It was blank too. In fact you can hear me on camera umming and ahhing wondering if anything was happening. There was no feedback to say the device was busy polling Facebook to get some initial users to display.

I added my Google account too. Adding accounts is simple enough. It's my expectations that need to change.

I assumed that by adding Facebook and Google, I'd get all my contacts synched -- as a big Google Apps user, I'm accustomed to my devices pulling down my contacts (and email). And for that matter, my calendar too. That didn't happen. What did arrive down on my device were my Google Talk contacts -- good enough for instant messaging. And strangely, my Facebook contacts didn't come with their phone numbers. So whilst I can see my wife's photo and status, I can't call her from the device as I can't remember her number.

This could well be entirely inaccurate -- it's my first sweep with the device. I've had to go back to BlackBerry for this morning (lots of things going on) but I will be swapping back to the H1 to experience more, soon.

It's going to be interesting to see what this device is like...

Just got it moments ago...

Prior to acquiring bucketloads of fun-size mars bars for the screaming hordes of children in Chiswick on Saturday (Halloween), I popped into the Chiswick High Road Vodafone shop for an introduction to Vodafone 360.

And it was a highly unsatisfactory experience. Yet somewhat informative about how Big Red is viewing the noted release of the new platform, especially from a developer perspective. It's always fascinating to see how the end-consumer experience compares to the usually slick corporate presentation.

I shall regale you with the experience later on. Possibly in the newsletter this Friday -- as it's a biggie.

It's my current position that developing for Vodafone is a career limiting move. So limiting in fact, that you'd be better with Nokia and Symbian at the moment. And that is saying something.

Anyway, more later.