The simple answer is: you can not log out of Facebook on Vodafone 555 Blue.

This is intentionally done this way and there is actually no need to do so. It may be the case that a user has not really unerstood how the device works with Facebook when the desire to log out comes up. So let me try to explain what is actually happening:

When you login to Facebook, we synchronize your contacts, wall, messages, newsfeed and albums. By default, the device will now connect to the network every 20 minutes and check for updates (like new messages and notifications, etc.). You should have received a suitable data tariff from your local Vodafone country with the device so that this data traffic should not be of any concern to you.

If you still want to save on the amount of data the devices requires, we have implemented several mechanisms that allow you to control your data spend without requiring you to sign out of Facebook. Please go into the “Settings -> Facebook settings” menu. Then go into “Background updates” and put all three settings to “Manual update”. This will switch the device to complete manual mode and it will not fetch any updates in the background anymore.

Please note that this means that you will not receive any Facebook messages, notifications or any other updates anymore. You will have to manually refresh by e.g. using the f-key (set to “Refresh Facebook data”).

If you are not worried about data consumption but you care about privacy only, then you can protect the device with a lock code from unwanted access. In this mode, you will have to enter a 4-digit code every time you unlock the device. Please go into “Settings->Security->Activate phone code” to turn this feature on. The default code is “1234″ and you can change it in the menu below (“Change phone code”). You can obviously always use this feature, regardless of your data prefetching settings.

Lastly, if you want to use the phone with a different Facebook account, you can simply go into “Settings->Facebook settings->My account” and sign in with a different account. Please note: This will not immediately clear your phonebook and other settings. So if you want to completely change the account on the phone (e.g. sell the phone to someone), then you will have to perform a factory reset to wipe all your data. Just turn off the phone. Then keep the “v” key pressed while you turn it on again. Then follow the instructions on the screen to clear the data.

I hope you can see that there simply is no need at all to log out of Facebook. You can always log in with a different account, turn off all background synchronization to control your data spend and protect the device from unauthorized use.

If you are looking to make a change to the world of telecommunications then we are keen to hear about your ideas.

Apply online here: http://bit.ly/tWUXMM

The idea was that out of your whole Facebook friends, you really may not be close friends with absolutely everybody. So we wanted to have a way to filter all the incoming status updates to only show the most relevant of your contacts. This way you will not miss important updates of your closest friends in a long list of Farmville-Spam.

Managing your favourites has the effect of the News Feed showing updates from your favourite friends in a seperate tab and your phonebook showing also only the list of your close friends in the same tab. We also created another seperate application that combines these two into one simple view.

Another not so straightforward goodie is that you can add any person from your contacts directly onto your homescreen. So your best girlfriend/boyfriend can be added here any you will see their avatar appearing. This gives you direct access to their profile with just one click.

Managing favourites is as simple as going through your contact list and mark people from the options menu.

One of the features that I am personally really excited about is the automatic merging of Facebook and Phonebook contacts. So for every contact that can safely be matched, the phone will automatically merge the accounts. Safe matching is currently defined as having the same phone number or email address.

The automatich merging will happen when you:
- Import contacts from SIM
- Import contacts from Facebook
- Import contacts from PC Suite
- Add a new Facebook friend

So for example when you add a new friend on Facebook that you already have in your phonebook, the next time your device synchronizes, the Facebook profile will be added to the existing phonebook entry. We really liked this, give it a try

As a recommendation, it will work best if you import your Facebook friends at first as per the normal device setup flow and then import your Outlook/Windows contacts using the PC Suite. In some versions of Outlook, the PC Suite can be a bit hard to use. Just go to the contacts section first and wait for your Outlook contacts to load and after that do a phone synchronization. The PC Suite can be downloaded here.

Synchronization behaviour
The device will regularly connect to the Facebook servers and look for updates. The interval is fixed and can not be modified. As a customer you will see a little animation in the top of the status bar when the device is doing background transfers. It is worthwhile to understand that Facebook data is synchronized at different intervals. In every interval, the device will look for new messages, notifications and status updates in the newsfeed. Roughly four times per day, changes in the addressbook and other more static parts of the phone are fetched. This means that some pieces of data (e.g. a new friend) will not appear in the phonebook immediately.

These are the setting options (Facebook settings -> Background updates):

Basic
This is the most important information (messages, notifications, phonebook) and it is recommended to leave this on “auto”. Manual will give you a completely static experience and you will have to actively refresh the resepctive apps all the time.

News Feed
This is setting will control the prefetching of the News Feed. If you leave this on “auto”, your news will be constantly loaded and you will see the counters going up automatically. If this is set to manual, the News Feed has to be refreshed to be updated. The benefit of manual refesh is that it will save GPRS data volume as a manual refesh will only poll the last 200 items max.

News Feed pictures
When we designed the device, we realized that pictures in the News Feed account for about 30% of all data usage. Setting this option to “Manual update” will only load images in the News Feed when they are viewed. The effect is a big savings in GPRS data volume for the cost of having to wait for the pictures to load while browsing.

News Feed picture size
Unfortunately Facebook does not provide a picture size that would exactly match the screen resolution of the Vodafone 555 Blue. Therefore we decided to go with a smaller size of images by default to make the experience really fast. If the default size is too small, you can change the picture size to high resolution. The effect will be that the device will load a much bigger picture from the Facebook server (about 4 times as big) which will look better for the cost of increasing the loading time and GPRS data usage. As a user, you can experiment with this setting to see what works best for you.

It’s been an amazing ride and certainly one of the most exciting things I have done at Vodafone ever. So this was/is my gig: build the world’s most affordable feature phone with the deepest/best quality Facebook integration. The objective was not to preload a Facebook client onto this, instead rather integrate the Facebook functionality into the natural places. So now we have Facebook messaging being one component of the overall messaging experience, your albums are part of the gallery, etc. What we have built is really the most natural way to use Facebook. I wish I could call it “Facebook phone”, because this is what it was designed to be.

Looking back at the project now I am really thankful for being able to work with a lot of great people in Vodafone, TCT and Facebook. For us here at the Vodafone devices team, this has been a bit of disruptive approach in how we run device projects and I am happy that the whole team has been so receptive for all the unconventional ideas/methods I pushed for. What I am really proud of is that we managed to run this project much more in a hands-on startup fashion than other traditional projects and it proved to be the right way to do it. While Vodafone usually rather has more of a serious image (compared to silicon valley startups) towards the outside world, I think people would be amazed to see how cool it can be to work at Vodafone.

Roughly two more weeks to go before we hit the public and I am eagerly waiting to hear what people will say.

This is where you can find the product page http://www.vodafone.com/vodafone555blue.

Update 25th of July’11: we will annouce in two days from now. Location looks quite nice – Soho Hotel in London. I am really curious how the press will receive the Vodafone 555 Blue. We will have samples to give away – excited Unfortunately I am not allowed to update the Facebook application page, yet. Although the device just leaked a few days ago with images and partly wrong spec. I guess nobody really gets it like this, there is just too much inside you can not explain in one line.

The one big problem i still had was how to make it display a gallery of many items, that are not references with HTML tags. So, fine, the normal way is great. Still what i wanted was to display a gallery of e.g. 20 items, while i only showed a preview of 6 on the screen.

I thought about all crazy things as i could not find any docs on how to make this work with fancybox until i came across a post on googledocs. In fact the solution was rater simple, there is actually a (undocumented) way to pass images in the form of an array:

<a href=”#” id=”mod_gallery”>Gallery</a>

$("#mod_gallery").click(function() {

$.fancybox(
[
{"title": "Image title 1", "href": "http://some.image.url"},
{"title": "Image title 2", "href": "http://some.image.url"},
{"title": "Image title 3", "href": "http://some.image.url"}

],
{

'padding': 0,
'transitionIn': 'elastic',
'transitionOut': 'elastic',
'type' : 'image',
'changeFade' : 0,
'overlayOpacity': 0.8,
'overlayColor': '#000000'

}

);

});

Ingredients:
- 3 egg whites
- 1 whole egg
- 1 big handful of fresh spinch leaves
- 1 small can (400g) of black beans (3/4 will also do)
- Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil
- Creamy balsamic vinegar (optional)

Directions:
- Cook the beans in a pot at medium heat for about 10-15 minutes (until they get a bit creamy)
- Mix the eggs with an egg beater, add salt and pepper to your liking
- Heat a small pan (3/4 heat) and add a little bit of olive oil
- Pour half of the eggs into the pan and slowly bake them like a pancake
- When done, prepare the first pancake on a plate and spread the beans over it, then add the washed spinach
- Bake the second pancake and add it on top of the first
- Optionally add some balsamic vingear

Ingredients (2-3 servings):
- 1 pork fillet (>500g)
- 2 teaspoons of premium mustard
- 4 cloves of garlic
- 1/2 teaspoon of rosemary
- 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
- Salt
- Pepper

Directions:
- Heat the oven to 160°C
- Cut the garlic into 2-3 chunks each
- Cut the fillet into three pices and cut each open about half way along its length
- Fill the inside with a portion of the mustard, add salt, pepper and rosemary
- Seal each fillet with a toothpick
- Heat a frying pan, add the oil and garlic – fry for 1-2 minutes
- Add the fillet pieces, keeping the full heat
- Fry the fillet from all sides so it gets a little bit brown (about 5-6 mins in total)
- Put the pan with the fillet into the oven and gently cook for 15-17 minutes

Ingredients (3 servings):
- 1 small oninon
- 1 small tomato
- 1 clove of garlic
- 2 slices of bacon
- 1 can (400g) of pinto beans
- 1 can (400g) of red beans
- 100g fresh green beans
- 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 teaspoon thyme
- Pepper
- Salt

Directions:
- Peel and cut onion and garlic into small pieces, wash green beans and cut in half, cut tomato into mid size cubes
- Open the cans and pour away half of the sauce
- Heat a fyring pan and add the olive oil, thyme, garlic, bacon and onion, fry for a 2 minutes
- Add green beans and fry for another 3-4 minutes
- Add the rest of the beans and stir
- Turn down the heat to 2/3 and add the tomato
- Continue stirring and cook for about 8-10 minutes until it gets a little creamy