The INQ Cloud Touch is the company’s first foray into Android, but it’s been a long time coming – it’s been a full year and a half since the company’s last new models were announced. We spoke with INQ’s CEO Frank Meehan to find out what goes on in making an Android phone, as well as what’s coming up in the future. Read on for the full lowdown.
In a telephone interview in January, we spoke with Meehan, who told us about the challenges building an Android phone that stands out from the crowd, as well as what’s next for the company.
As a mobile phone maker, INQ is still comparatively small – 200 staff are spread across offices in London, Rome, Beijing, Delhi, San Francisco, Singapore and Hong Kong – and getting to the stage where an Android phone is ready to go has taken a while. In fact, Frank confesses he first had plans for an Android phone “back in 2008. It took a lot longer than I thought I would”.
INQ Cloud Touch in depth preview
The real challenge, despite INQ’s startup status, wasn’t sourcing hardware for the INQ Cloud Touch affordably (“It’s a lot easier than it used to be, there’s so many Chinese players now”), but crafting something easy to use for INQ’s audience, that stood out from the crowd, something Meehan thinks almost every Android manufacturer bar HTC and Samsung fails to do right now.
“Most companies except Apple just churn out new hardware…the others are just, ‘Here’s another piece of hardware, let’s chuck it in the market and see what happens.’…I didn’t want to do just another generic Android handset: we’re trying to cut the crap, that’s our philosophy here…We consciously set out not to do another widget, Motoblur [Motorola's software skin on Android] type overlay which is just a bit of pretty art.”
In a bid to cut said crap, INQ has once again focused on making Facebook easy to use on the INQ Cloud Touch, adding deep links to services within it from the homescreen and adding a news feed that prioritises friends based on your interactions with them. But it appears Meehan would like to further refine Facebook on the INQ Cloud Touch rather before adding new services.
“I think people underestimate Facebook,” he tell us. “It’s much greater than a social network: it’s a communication platform…probably most of my chat is on Facebook…I don’t think any other social network offers that.”
But INQ is keeping tabs on the big services right now, and even investing in a few. “We’re certainly looking at Foursquare as a bigger thing…(and) we have another couple of internet company investments that we haven’t disclosed”, he revealed, which certainly has us wondering about future INQ handsets beyond the INQ Cloud Touch.
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Speaking of which – how about that future hardware? Is INQ all Android all the time, or will Brew OS, the low power operating system it used previously on the INQ One, INQ Chat 3G and INQ Mini 3G make a return?
“We’ll watch Brew and see what Brew does,” he said. “I think Android is more advanced – there is a space for Brew, we’re watching and seeing what comes out of it.”
Right now, it’s Android 24/7, and Meehan is quick to assure us that future updates for the INQ Cloud Touch will be quick. “We’ve tried not to muck around with Android itself….We started originally on 2.1 and ported 2.2 very quickly.”
“What we try to be very clear about is Android is a very good platform, it just needs consumer stuff on top of it,” he said. “Yeah certainly, we want to keep the Android updates flowing.”
Whether that’s before INQ follows up with another Android phone remands to be seen: right now, the focus is on bringing INQ’s flavour of Google OS to more powerful phones. “The plans are now very heavily in motion to bring the experiences we’ve got onto higher end hardware – so let’s see where we go from here.”
The INQ Cloud Touch is the company’s first foray into Android, but it’s been a long time coming – it’s been a full year and a half since the company’s last new models were announced. We spoke with INQ’s CEO Frank Meehan to find out what goes on in making an Android phone, as well as what’s coming up in the future. Read on for the full lowdown.
