Is Your Next Phone Going to Be Social?
Last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the INQ1 won the best mobile handset award, beating out other nominees like Google G1, BlackBerry Storm and the Nokia E71. What’s special about the INQ1? It is the world’s first “social phone”.
With the INQ1 handset, you are always connected to your social network. Integration with social networks like Facebook is deep throughout the handset. For example, all your contacts from different social networks are aggregated on your handset. Contact list shows presence, uses the same social network profile photos and includes status updates from your friends.
INQ1’s integrates contact list with presence and status updates from your social networks.
Your message inbox aggregates all your messages from Facebook, your Emails, Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Other interesting features of the phone include built-in support for Last.fm and Skype calling.
INQ1 is made by INQ Mobile Ltd., a wholly owned company of Hutchison Whampoa (a Hong Kong company). INQ Mobile was only recently launched by Hutchison last year, and it’s great to see that its first device has won a significant award.
While we think the concept of integrating your data (email & contacts) with your social networks make a lot of sense, we definitely think INQ1 can do some more work with its user interface. The user interface falls way below the bar with today’s standards as can be seen below.
It remains to be seen whether this phone will be successful in the market place.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
[...] the phone, for example, on its home screen as well as in the Contact list. This is not unlike what INQ is trying to do as we have reported back in [...]