Way back on November 17th of 2011 we were reporting on the relaunch of Vodafone’s AppSelect portal, which was a standalone app publishing and recommendation engine designed for Android users. Everyone was a bit sceptical as to the actual need for it, what with Google already doing exactly that very well, and, well, AppSelect has now been killed off by Vodafone.
Here’s the network’s reasoning:
In light of the number and variety of application stores already available to our customers, Vodafone has been reviewing its own AppSelect service. The review has now concluded and Vodafone has decided to phase out AppSelect by 31 January 2013 as its customers are already well-served by existing application stores. Other Vodafone content services will not be affected.
Wonder how many customers it actually had in the end?
Good bye, AppSelect. We literally never even really knew you, although it was nice to have the option of charging paid apps to our mobile phone accounts, something Google’s still not really got to grips with.
It’s smooth to use, the 1080p display is sharp, clear and bright, the device is extremely light and thin and therefore very pocketable and portable — much more so than other 5-inch phones we’ve used. And yet… we’re a bit unimpressed by the overall package…
A relatively high-spec smartphone, with a 4.5″ display running at 480 x 854 resolution and powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, plus the Ascend G510 arrives running Android 4.1.1 — albeit potentially hindered by Huawei only sticking 512MB of RAM inside it..
The Panasonic Eluga marks the company’s return to the European mobile phone scene years after several years of absence, and it’s come back to us with a moderately high-spec Android model that features a rather stylish, slim case.
Sony returns with an all-new mobile design for 2012, pairing a dual-core processor with a 720p display. It’s a lovely phone, but is it enough to end our Samsung and HTC obsession?
LG’s updated Prada phone comes with an absolutely crazy black & white theme, but is it just for fashionable suit wearers who want to make themselves look a bit more interesting?
lardboy
/ September 21, 2012I was part of the focus group that tested this; at no point in the testing were we actually asked “Do you think this is a good idea?” We repeatedly insisted that they needed to have some amazing reason to use this over the Android App Store or AppBrain (that they asked us to compare to) and they obviously failed to pay any attention.
Still, it was nice to earn a couple of hundred quid for messing around with phones for a few hours.