Jenneth Orantia – APC Magazine
Usually, if you wanted advanced functions like instant messaging, Skype, and a half decent web browser and email client in a mobile, you’d have to fork out a pretty penny for a smartphone that runs Windows Mobile, Series 60, BlackBerry or iPhone. The INQ, pitched as ‘the world’s most advanced social networking phone’, tries to merge all the different mobile communication methods together into one easy-to-use prepaid mobile, but whether it does a better job of it than the classic smartphones depends on just how much functionality you’re willing to compromise on.
If you’re simply after the basics, the INQ has got you covered. Its offers Windows Live Messenger for chatting, Skype for VoIP, Facebook for social networking, an email client, and the standard phone functions for voice calls and text messaging.
Our favourite feature is the live address book, which pulls contacts from each of your services and plugs them into the contacts list. Once your contacts are all organised, you can then open the addressbook and get a choice of how you wish to contact each person: phone (voice call, video call or text message), Windows Live Messenger, Facebook (poke, message or wall), Skype (call or message) or email. It’ll even pull profile photos from Facebook for each of your contacts, and show live presence information for Windows Live Messenger and Skype.
The INQ’s got its heart in the right place, but in practice, we found the phone to be too buggy and limited to enjoy for very long. The INQ is the most unstable mobile we’ve tested in a long time, with random resets occurring while we were signing into Windows Live Messenger, Skype, and even just browsing through the icons on the home screen. Windows Live Messenger was particularly flaky – seven times out of ten, launching the program would cause the phone to crash, and we constantly got ‘Soap Exception’ errors.
Facebook and Windows Live Messenger are the INQ’s two main drawcards, but if you’re hoping for PC-like functionality, you’re in for a big disappointment. The only features that the Facebook program offers above the generic mobile version of the site is that new friend requests and messages come up as system prompts, much like a text message or missed phone call. For all other purposes, the INQ’s Facebook application is vastly inferior to the mobile web version, and clicking on any of the stories in the main feed (of which only 12 are shown at a time, with no option to see stories before that) simply launches the Facebook mobile site anyway. Really, you’re better off just logging into Facebook through the web browser.
As for Windows Live Messenger, it’s got most of the features that you’d expect in a mobile client, like emoticons, tabbed chatting for multiple conversations, and group chats, but for some reason you only get notified of new messages if the Windows Live Messenger program is active. It can run in the background and keep you signed in, but – annoyingly – you don’t get any beeps or dialog boxes to let you know that you’ve got a new message, so you have to constantly go back to the program to check.
The Skype service is probably the most well-developed application on the INQ, letting you call other Skype users in your contacts list and send them instant messages. Unlike the Skype on the desktop and Windows Mobile, however, you can’t call landlines or mobiles – calls are strictly limited to within the Skype network. 3 charges usage on a per-unit basis, and you get a certain number of minutes and messages within each plan; on the $29 prepaid cap, you get 4,000 minutes (or over two hours a day) and 10,000 instant messages a month.
Those are our main gripes when it comes to the INQ phone; in other respects, it’s pretty decent for an entry-level mobile. It’s extremely compact and light, with a classy brushed aluminium casing and sturdy spring-loaded slider. There aren’t any gimmicky input controls or buttons: just the standard soft keys below the screen, five-way navigation pad, call buttons, and the usual numeric keypad on the lower half of the slider.
Likewise, the INQ’s user interface is nice and straightforward, with a menu carousel on the standby screen for cycling through the main programs like Messenger, MySpace (really just a link to the web site), Skype, Facebook, Web and Contacts without having to dig through the menu system. There are also a handful of widgets that you can add to the standby screen, including a Google search bar, weather forecast and large time and date.
Multimedia is a mixed bag on the INQ: on the one hand, the external speaker is one of the loudest we’ve heard on a mobile, and it’ll happily stream YouTube clips and play back stored music and movies through its media player. The music program has also got Last.FM integration, so it’ll scrobble your music and list artist recommendations and track recommendations while you’re playing music. On the other hand, it only uses the one connector for the syncing, charging, and connecting headphones (so you’ll need an adapter to use your own cans), and internal memory is a measly 50MB (although there’s a microSD slot under the battery for adding more storage).
Most browsers at this end of the market are limited to WAP only, so we were pleasantly surprised to discover the INQ has a full HTML browser, with support for multiple windows, reformatting to fit the page, and a minimap for showing an overview of the page overview while scrolling and panning. It does a good job at rendering complicated web sites, including bank and discussion forum sites, but it’s just extremely slow to use – the pages load slowly despite the phone’s fast HSDPA connection, and scrolling through pages also happens at a snail’s pace.
The latter can probably be put down to the INQ’s limited processing power. We weren’t able to get confirmation of the chip used, but we encountered a lot of lag when using each of the different functions. Couple that with the buggy state of the INQ’s firmware, and you’ve got a phone that’s more than a little frustrating to use in practice. We’re a big fan of the whole ‘smartphone for the rest of us’ concept, and love the INQ’s live address book feature, but the numerous bugs and limitations make it a hard phone to recommend – bargain basement pricetag notwithstanding.
