Although designed by a relatively nascent company, the INQ Chat 3G has a good hardware line up and a decent sub-£100 price tag, making it a really intriguing prospect.
The fact it's got a full QWERTY keypad, native Twitter support for the homepage, the now regulation INQ Facebook/Skype/MSN Chat integration on top of an app store bodes well - but can all that technology be crammed into a budget handset sensibly?
When picking up the INQ Chat 3G, the first thing that strikes you is how light it is - the phone is basically all plastic and rubber, but the width of it in the hand means it doesn't feel too cheap, although it certainly doesn't have the build quality of the BlackBerry range.
The front of the phone is dominated by the QWERTY keyboard with the large circular D-Pad encasing the enter button, with the menu, clear and softkeys alongside.
The back of the phone houses the cool interchangeable covers, which hark back to more fun days when everyone had the Nokia 3310 and had their own cover in their own style. Admittedly it was 90 per cent England flags... but hey, we're all about choice here.
The side of the phone also packs the carousel key - this brings the basic functions of the phone up, like Skype, Facebook and so on - we found ourselves hitting this accidentally far too often, meaning we needed to shift the phone in the hand to use it effectively.
The phones uses a miniUSB cable, like the rest of the INQ/Skypephone range, which means that it won't be frontwards compatible when the inevitable change to microUSB happens in a few years time - but we doubt many people buying this will care too much about that.
The phone basically sits nicely in the hand, although the QWERTY keyboard does react better to two-handed action compared to being able to flick through it one-handed as you might on a slimmer candybar device.
The 2.4-inch screen is good enough for the task as well, coming in at QVGA resolution. It's not going to be amazing for video or anything like that, but it's wide enough to see all your tweets and the like on with ease.
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kevtoon
December 24th 2010
1. What can I say about this phone. Well, I originally bought the ZTE Racer, not a bad android phone, doesnt what it says on the tin, resistive screen is ok at best, and the camera is absolutly terrible. So I decided on a cheap phone with a qwerty keyboard(why not a nokia C3, you ask. I dont know myself) This phone feels weighty and quite solid, not flimsy at all, which I expected. Thats where the good things end. The phones is terribly slow, frustratingly. Facebook takes an age, and the almost HTML esque MSN, is nothing short of terrible. INQ has an apparant APP Store, which is best avoided. The qwerty keyboard itself, is slightly raised, and very difficult to type on due to the way it is bevelled. The 3.2 mp camera is alot better than the ZTE Racers 3.2mp camera, so that is a plus point. But for a phone that boasts social networking at its core, these things are just to slow for any long term use. This phone is best used for recycling, or fo throwing out of windows in frustration!
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