Vodafone 555 Blue review

Feature-phones aren’t exactly beautiful, awe-inspiring pieces of advanced technology that make us rush out of our homes and stand in outrageously long queues to get our hands on them. They’re usually budget devices with limited features, aimed at the lower end of the market.

That’s exactly where the Vodafone 555 Blue falls. In short, it’s a feature-phone with deep Facebook integration that’s priced at R749 on prepaid or R99 per month on contract.

In the box

Aside from the phone, in the box you can expect to find a charger, earphones, and a manual. There’s no microSD card or even a data transfer cable, so you’ll have to bring your own.

Hardware

Internally, the Vodafone 555 Blue has little to brag about, but enough to make it useful and worthwhile for its target market. It has a 200MHz CPU with 40MB worth of internal storage that can be expanded by an additional 16GB via microSD.

Connectivity-wise, it supports GPRS, EDGE and Bluetooth 2.1.

Sure, this isn’t a feature set that makes tech-nerds weak at the knees, but this phone isn’t aimed at that market. The specs are enough to make it useful as a feature-phone that can call, SMS, and MMS, while also giving users enough of the Internet to get to their e-mails and Facebook.

Vodafone 555 blue front and angle view

Design and build quality

The phone’s casing isn’t exactly what you’d call “premium” quality material – it’s plastic, but overall it feels like durable plastic that can survive a drop or two.The front of the casing is coloured silver, while the back is a pearl-white.

The back casing is quite difficult to remove. One MyBroadband staff member actually gave up trying to remove it in fear of breaking it.

On the back, you’ll find the 2 megapixel camera with a single LED flash. Below these is a speaker grille.

The left side holds the volume rocker – coloured blue to make finding it a little easier.

The right side holds the microUSB port for data transfer and charging, while on top there’s the 3.5mm jack. The bottom is left bare.

Up front is the 2.4″ QVGA (320×240) screen. It’s not something worth bragging about, but it’s definitely not bad.

Directly below that are the call answer and decline buttons, along with two buttons for getting into additional menus and an optical trackpad for navigation. At first it was slightly difficult to tell that the additional options buttons existed, as they aren’t marked at all. Below this row of buttons sits the portrait QWERTY keyboard.

It’s a light and fairly inexpensive exterior, but it certainly doesn’t feel cheap.

Sound and call quality

Call quality was generally good – parties on both ends reported that voice came through loud and clear. The speaker on the back is palatable, but bass output is pretty much a no-show.

Earphone output was very disappointing. Songs that play fine on other devices distorted quite heavily when played via the Vodafone 555 Blue, through its bundled headset and other earphones.

Keyboard

The 4-row QWERTY keyboard is fairly standard, with the exclusion of the dedicated camera and Facebook keys. The former is a nice touch, allowing you to take a photo at a moment’s notice, and after you’re done there’s even a quick way to share it on Facebook from within the camera app. Whether anyone really needs a dedicated Facebook button remains to be seen; I remain unconvinced. Still, for the heavy Facebook users, it could make life slightly simpler.

Using the keyboard to type out messages wasn’t particularly great. The keys are slightly rounded to make typing easier, but mistypes were still very common. It’s a far way off from besting BlackBerry, though that’s probably not the market that this phone is seeking to capture.

Vodafone 555 blue rear and side view

Camera

The 2MP rear-facing camera is capable of 1600×1200 still shots, though not particularly good ones. Most of our shots came out blurry and sometimes pixellated. If it’s all you have and you desperately need to take a photo of something, fine; otherwise switch to something else.

Video capture is downright terrible and should be avoided at all costs.

Battery life

Overall the battery life on the Vodafone 555 Blue was good. With a constant connection with some calls, texts and Facebooking, it should last around five days or maybe even a week, depending on use.

Software

The Vodafone 555 Blue is a feature-phone, though it does include a few applications to give it a bit more utility.

The most important is obviously the deep Facebook integration. When booting up for the first time you’ll be prompted to enter your Facebook credentials and from that point on, updating your status or checking out your feed is literally one button away.

Contacts can be imported from Facebook and you have access to Facebook chat as well. The integration is done well – you only have to log in once and after that you don’t have to worry about your credentials again.

A simple note taking application allows you to share notes via SMS, MMS, e-mail, and Bluetooth, but not Facebook, which is slightly strange.

There’s a basic task list with which you can create and check-off tasks, though these don’t appear to sync with anything, limiting its actual usefulness.

Also included is a converter application that allows you to convert length and weight from one unit to another. It doesn’t really compare to apps that one can find for smartphones. Perhaps it should be treated as a present – it’s the thought that counts – but odds are that you’re rather going to ask Google to do conversions for you if needed.

One of the more useful applications is Palringo – an IM client that can connect you to XMPP, ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, iChat, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. Irritatingly, it requires its own account that then links all of your accounts together.

Data transfer between the phone and a PC deserves a special mention. The Vodafone 555 Blue has a microUSB port, as previously mentioned. It is indeed for charging and data transfer, but data transfer can only occur if you have a microSD card in the device. Seeing as the phone doesn’t come with one in the box, it may be that you don’t have one from the beginning, which means that you can’t get your photos off of the phone via a direct transfer – you’ll have to e-mail them to yourself or upload them to Facebook and download them again or find some other workaround.

However, when you do finally put a microSD card in the phone, you can’t access the photos already on the device – you have to transfer them to the SD card. This wouldn’t be too bad if you didn’t have to transfer each one separately, but alas, you do.

Conclusion

In a world where the top phones are battling it out with 1GHz+ multi-core processors, more storage than I needed five years ago, and fighting over whether or not they support 4G connectivity, the Vodafone 555 Blue is solidly in the low end.

It has all the features that a mobile phone user needs, and gives just enough of a taste of the wonders of the Internet for those users to consider a low-end smartphone for their next upgrade.

There’s nothing that’s particularly outstanding about the Vodafone 555 Blue, but there’s also nothing particularly damning either. There are things that will more than likely drive high-end smartphone users up the walls, but the actual target market won’t really care about.

If you’re looking for a mobile phone that has good Facebook capabilities, then the Vodafone 555 Blue is worth looking at. If you’re looking for something more advanced, keep looking.