Dedicated Facebook mobile phone has a simplistic charm

Vodafone 555 Blue makes calls but is mostly designed for social networking, says Noel Campion.

For those who use it, Facebook has become an integral part of their lives, and for many an addiction that must be fed every few minutes.

Before the smartphone, Facebook users had to sit near their computers to be drip-fed their social network data, but now, if you can afford the latest gadget, you can be almost anywhere and still keep in touch your virtual friends. A much cheaper option comes in the form of the Vodafone 555 Blue. For the once-off cost of €59, the pay-as-you go 555 Blue has been designed for little else but making and receiving calls and for Facebook.

The relatively low purchase price is down to the fact that the 555 Blue isn’t a fancy, high-tech smartphone running on Apple IOS or even Google’s Android OS. Instead, the manufacturers have created their own OS based on Java, called Obigo Q05A, with the intention of offering a more integrated Facebook experience.

Although the 555 Blue is not really a smartphone, it does have a nice QWERTY keypad (complete with dedicated blue Facebook button) that is reminiscent of an older generation of BlackBerry phone. The keys have a positive feel when you press them and are spaced just the right distance apart to make it easy to let the world know your latest thoughts on Facebook or send a text or email.

Although the 555 Blue’s casing is plastic, it does feel reasonably robust, and the 2.4-inch QVGA (320x240pixel) landscape display is bright and easy to read on menu’s and in emails or SMS messages. The 555 Blue does not have 3G or even Wi-Fi support to keep the cost down, but instead uses dual-band EDGE and a really slow 200 MHz MediaTek processor.

The Vodafone 555 Blue also comes with a 2-megapixel camera with LED flash, a 3.5mm headset jack, and 60 MB of internal memory.

Storage is expandable via microSD cards with up to 16Gb supported, Bluetooth 2.1, an FM radio with RDS, music player and a 1000 mAh battery with a claimed talk time of 18 hours and 700 hours in standby.

The software line-up is basic, but you do get an IM client, an email client with POP3 and IMAP support, a calendar, and Opera mini for web browsing.

In the apps folder, you’ll also find Palrigo, weather, RSS news feed, tasks, notes, calculator, converter and stopwatch.

The external loud speaker grille and 2MP camera are found on the back.

The camera produces fairly mediocre photos, which isn’t too surprising considering this is a budget phone.

A nice touch is that there’s a dedicated camera button located on the bottom left of the QWERTY keypad. The speaker is surprisingly loud, even compared to some of the more expensive smartphones, but predictably tinny sound quality.

And finally, the Facebook integration works well and does exactly what it says on the tin. Pressing the Facebook button brings you directly to the news feed screen.

Of course, you have to log into your Facebook account first, but as soon as you do you’ll be able to see all of your contacts, updates and the calendar is automatically populated with your Facebook birthdays.

The 555 Blue is not a touchscreen, so everything is navigated via the optical button in the middle of the phone, which also acts as an enter key, with two soft keys either side of it.

One of the key features of this phone is its ability to refresh your updates, and download your emails, all in the background.

This means you don’t have to manually hit a refresh button, but you don’t have the option of changing the frequency of the updates either.

The 555 Blue is designed to make it as easy as possible to instantly access your Facebook account on the go. Unfortunately, it isn’t perfect and it can be frustrating to use at times. Scrolling down through a long list of updates is very slow.

This slowness is evident right throughout the user interface, which is down to the slow processor and the fact that there’s so much stuff happening in the background.

Also, the Facebook chat is a separate app and not integrated into the Facebook interface, which is a pity.

Viewing Facebook photos is a real pain and slow to download, unless you’ve opened and downloaded each individual picture and there’s no way to scroll through them in an album-style browser — this is where you really miss a Wi-Fi or even 3G connection.

The Vodafone 555 Blue is a relatively cheap way of getting your Facebook fix on the go, but lacks many of the features and power we’ve come to expect from most modern mobile phones. A faster processor would have made all of the difference to the 555 Blue.

However, despite my initial impressions, which were lukewarm, over a week of use I started to warm to its simplistic charm.