Vodafone intros LiMo R2 handsets for social aggregation platform

Wireless behemoth Vodafone on Thursday announced an aggregation platform that brings a user’s contacts, social networks and messages together in one place.

Vodafone 360 will feature a specially designed user interface using Vodafone’s ‘proximity algorithm’ (it brings the most frequently contacted to the front of the list), which was built and designed on the LiMo Foundation’s Linux platform and heralds the first handsets to be built on LiMo R2.

LiMo – another splinter group chasing the mobile Linux bandwagon – is known to be very accommodating to the operator community, seeing handset customisation as its forte. Other than Vodafone, the operators that intend to bring LiMo-based handsets to market include NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SK Telecom, Telefonica and Verizon Wireless.

Handsets for the upcoming operator deployments will be sourced from LiMo OEMs which have worked on the development of the platform, including LG, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, CasioHitachi, Huawei and ZTE.

Samsung will be providing the first LiMo R2 handsets to be used by Vodafone 360, with the first of these confirmed as the H1. The device features HSDPA, wifi, a five megapixel camera, a 3.5 inch WVGA AMOLED display, 16GB of memory and a MicroSD card slot.

Over 1,000 apps will be available for the LiMo handsets at launch via Vodafone’s own app store, the Vodafone Shop, and 360 will also be made available on Symbian-based Nokia handsets as a pre-install or a downloadable software suite.

Read our profile on Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMO Foundation

The native functionality of the 360 platform will focus on content aggregation – bringing together all contacts and content in one place and allowing customers access to different networking sites including Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk. Users can also create different contact groups across social networks, so as to share different information with different groups of people.

The service and handsets will launch in Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK before Christmas, and will be followed by launches in a number of other countries in 2010, including India, Turkey, South Africa, New Zealand and Romania and in France through SFR, through MTS in Russia, and through Vodafone Hutchison Australia.