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The INQ Chat 3G has a lot of interesting ideas - from the QWERTY keyboard to the Twitter integration, we certainly appreciated the effort.
A range of covers and colours is cool, and we'll be interested to see what's next from INQ if this is the direction it's taking.
We liked
The INQ Chat 3G is a well specified phone, especially when you consider the price. For under £100 it's competing in a growing market, and it performs well. Yes, it's not a touchscreen, but not everyone wants that - and the QWERTY keyboard was a pretty good rendition.
The sheer range of social networking options makes this a winner in our eyes - we love being able to message someone on Facebook directly from the phone.
We also like the battery life and the inbuilt software - it's pretty snazzy, especially doubleTwist enabling us to convert, download and do all sorts of manipulation to media.
We disliked
However, we found far too many problems with the Chat 3G, and they blocked a lot of the things we liked so much. For instance, starting up contacts took so long we pretty much had time to go out, get another job and save up for an HTC Hero in the time it took.
This was due to the phone having a look through Facebook every so often to check for updates to your many friends (although we may just be far too popular) as well as having a look through Skype and MSN and so on.
The internet was also too slow at times - while the connection was good, it froze terribly on occasion, which means that having a cheap phone is good, but if it doesn't work it's ultimately pointless.
Verdict
Overall the INQ Chat 3G is a real Jekyll and Hyde phone. On the one hand, the sheer amount of things it can do is astounding - Facebook, Twitter, Skype et al, and all for under £100. And it functions as a modem to boot - something we really like.
However, it's just so slow and pokey sometimes that we struggled to use it - there's just too much going on and we kept worrying the processor would burst into flames under the pressure.
We hope this is a direction INQ is keen to keep pushing, as it really works - just not in the Chat 3G.
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