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Battery life
The good news about the lack of features on the Vodafone 555 Blue is that the battery life is pretty good; mainly because there's nothing in it that's heavy-usage enough to drain the resources.
It has a standard Lithium-ion battery that's quoted as offering three hours of talktime and 324 hours of standby time, and we lasted a good couple of days without having to charge it.
This may be handy for the target market and was great for us, too – until we cried thinking about all the cool features it could have had. Or how it could have been a smartphone.
Connectivity
Connectivity-wise, as we've already mentioned, there's not much going on. 2G, EDGE and Bluetooth are all on board, but there's not a peep of Wi-Fi, no 3G and no USB port for computer connections. It's painful. When trying to pair the device with a computer using Bluetooth, we failed miserably.
Maps are easy to explain on the Vodafone 555 Blue: there aren't any. And as for apps, well, what are described as 'apps' are your bog-standard calculator, note editor and so on. They're not about to set anyone alight, and although there's the option of a couple of Java games (including Sims 3, which is pretty cool for this phone), they're just trials and you'll have to fork out for the full things.
There are a couple of RSS news feeds, though, which is a plus. However, the feed simply gives you the headline paragraph and then the URL to open the rest in the browser, which then takes an age to open. As a result, there's no news-reading for the Vodafone 555 Blue owner without a signal.
For anyone whose Gmail contacts differ from their Facebook contacts, there's also Palringo, for instant messaging.
The calendar is nicely synced with Facebook, automatically adding in any contacts' birthdays, which is good given that they're not actually mentioned in the news feed itself.
Of course, what you're paying for with this phone is essentially one giant app that's solely Facebook-oriented. The additional add-ons are pared down so that Facebook is the main focus. It is of course, well integrated, but that doesn't mean it can't make for something a little boring. Unless, of course, you're 13 years old and live on the site.
