INQ MOBILE (no relation to The Inquirer, sorry), which was responsible for the INQ1 Facebook phone, has announced two similar 3G handsets - the candy bar design INQ Mini and the QWERTY Blackberry-esque looking INQ Chat, both of which it claims will be the first Twitter phones.
INQ Mobile is an offshoot of the cellular phone network Three. Its two new social notworking handsets will debut this autumn, with the INQ Mini to arrive in late September and the INQ Chat to follow shortly afterwards. Both devices will of course be flogged with Three network contracts.
The QWERTY keyboard based INQ Chat is going after the 2G Blackberry market where the upcoming Research In Motion Curve 8520 is set to dominate, only this INQ phone will offer 3G at a better price point than the RIM 8250 and will feature built-in push Gmail.
Both of these handsets are aimed at the social notworking crowd, with almost the same functionality as the slider based INQ1 handset from late last year. Only now there's also a Twitter client built into the phones' OS, which was missing from the first INQ handset, plus both of these can be used as 3G dongles as well.
It's rumoured that the INQ Mini will be priced even lower than the prepaid INQ1, which came out at launch priced at £79.99, or free on a monthly contract of £15 with free Facebook, Skype, IM and Internet usage.
We spent some time of late with these two handsets, which strike us as improvements on the first INQ mobile because they're faster with much more tightly integrated social notworking applications. We think mobile users will find them more useful in other respects, too. µ
