Following on from my 2 week trial of the INQ Mini mobile phone courtesy of those lovely people at 3mobilebuzz (http://www.3mobilebuzz.com) they’ve now sent me the INQ Mini’s big brother, the INQ Chat to try and my first reaction is that it’s a massive improvement over the INQ Mini which I found rather disappointing (see my review earlier in this blog).
There are just so many things I really like about this phone! The first is that, like the INQ Mini it looks fabulous, is very well designed, feels very good to hold and is nicely weighted. This INQ phone has the definite advantage of a full QWERTY keyboard making sending texts and e-mails an absolute doddle especially with the excellent predictive text.
The main selling point of this phone and the INQ Mini is as a social networking phone and both phones have Facebook and Twitter applications installed on them.As I detailed in my review of the INQ Mini the Facebook app is by far the better of the two however it does suffer from a bit of a time lag with the actual mobile website which I would still prefer to use. It is good to see however that with the Twitter app on the INQ Chat the correct time and date are now displayed on tweets, something which wasn’t the case on the INQ Mini.The same problem remains however that you can only view your most recent tweets and you still have to go online and log-in to the mobile Twitter website to view older tweets, a bit un-neccessary I feel and would still rather use either the excellent Dabr mobile Twitter site or the new mobile Twitter site at http://mobile.twitter.com. A feature I do like very much however are the Facebook and Twitter tickers which can be displayed on the phone’s home screen and display the most recent tweets and Facebook updates, a very handy feature.Other widgets can also be added to the home screen such as Yahoo! Weather, RSS feeds and World Clock.
The INQ Chat’s web browser is excellent, it connects to the web quickly and mobile websites look great, no complaints with it at all. The Planet3 portal can be accessed via the right soft key from the home screen.
Another feature which is included on this phone is push Gmail, something you’d not expect to see on a phone of this price and it works brilliantly! Once you’ve set up your Gmail account on the phone, any new e-mails are ‘pushed’ Blackberry style to your phone and a pop-up alert is displayed on the screen, an alert sound can also be switched on if required. Other web based and POP e-mail accounts can also be added but the e-mails for these can only be retrieved manually and are not ‘pushed’ to the phone.
Moving on next to the 3.2 mega-pixel camera on the INQ Chat, this is one of the best cameras I’ve used on a phone of this price, it’s really excellent, I took several photos indoors under artificial light and the quality and clarity of the image was easily as good if not slightly better than the 5 mega-pixel camera on my current phone, the LG Viewty KU990i! Any photos taken can then be stored on the phone or sent via e-mail, and rather conveniently, to Facebook or Twitter.
Any Facebook pokes or messages and any Twitter direct messages are displayed as alert boxes on the phone’s homescreen and it’s also possible to send a Facebook message or a Twitter direct message from the Messaging application, just as if you were sending a text message.
Also included on this phone, as with most 3 mobiles are Skype and Windows Live Messenger, both very useful and easy-to-use applications.
To sum up, this is a truly excellent phone and the best INQ have yet produced, I can find very little to dislike about it, it’s currently available on 3 pay-as-you-go for £99.99 or on various price plans on pay monthly, I would heartily recommend this phone for anyone, especially if you’re a keen Facebook or Twitter user. In fact I was so impressed with it that I’ve now added it to the list of phones that I’m considering when I’m eligible for an upgrade on my contract at the end of June, despite the fact that I currently use an LG Viewty KU990i, also an excellent phone in its own right! Thank you once again to the fantastic team at 3mobilebuzz for lending me the INQ Chat to trial, I am really enjoying playing with it!
