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Vodafone’s own-brand handset range updated for Christmas

Networks & Network Services
Vodafone has announced the launch of three new phones to its own-brand handset range. The Vodafone 553 qwerty side-slider, the Vodafone 945 Android smartphone and the refreshed Vodafone 543 are all due in store in time for the busy Christmas sales period.

The Vodafone 553 taps into the touchscreen with qwerty side-slider trend that is currently popular in high end smartphone design. The 2.8 inch rotatable touchscreen and keyboard give the customer the choice to use their phone to suit their communication needs, be it sending a quick text message, or a having longer catch-up with friends online.

The 553 is an ideal phone for email, messaging and mobile internet. It comes with Opera Mini 5.0 for mobile internet browsing, and just one tap from the start up screen takes the user straight to email or to leading social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger. The phone is powered by Vodafone’s 360 People, an address book which brings a customer’s various online contact lists together in one place and makes them available both on the phone and automatically backed up and in sync at 360 online.

Following in the footsteps of the popular Vodafone 845 launched in April 2010, the 945 is Vodafone’s second, very competitively priced own-brand Android smartphone.

The handset offers customers a best in class mobile internet experience and comes with all the services and features you would expect from a high end handset: Android 2.1 software; access to Marketplace and its tens of thousands of apps; Vodafone Music services and its catalogue of over 2 million DRM-free tracks; a 3.2 inch capacitive multi-touch screen with haptic feedback; a 5MP camera with flash; WiFi and 300MB of built-in memory that can be built up to 32GB with a Micro SD card.

Vodafone has collaborated with high street fashion brand, Miss Sixty, to update the Vodafone 543 with exclusive customised covers and phone accessories designed in colourful, on-trend graphics, all of which are reflective of the Miss Sixty brand. The Vodafone 543, launched in April 2010, has a 2.4 inch touch screen and runs Opera Mini 5.0 for mobile internet browsing. The phone also comes with Vodafone’s innovative pre-pay balance indicator, an always-on display of how much credit the customer has left to use.

Patrick Chomet, group director of terminals at Vodafone Group said: “We work hard to take the best, most relevant and exciting market trends and make them available at a great price to customers across the Vodafone footprint. In this instance, we’ve developed the Vodafone 553 and 945 to give customers affordable, fast access to the mobile internet data services that are seeing such growth in popularity, in fact, within two years we expect to see 70% of our mature market sales going to smartphones.”