The INQ Cloud Touch is the British-based company’s long anticipated first foray into Android. We’ve gone over the launch details already, but we’ve also had a chance to see the Froyo phone before release and try it out for ourselves. Read on, and see what we make of it so far.
While we were unable to take photos, we were able to get a good long look at the INQ Cloud Touch and play around with its new features plastered on top of Android 2.2, and while we don’t intend to pass judgement on non final hardware or software, what we saw was already bug-free and at the very least a new vision for how an Android phone should work.
Or rather, how a Facebook centric phone should work: you can bet the INQ Cloud Touch was the handset at the centre of all those rumours TechCrunch came out with last year. INQ worked closely with Facebook on the software skin – but first, to the hardware.
Hardware
The INQ Cloud Touch has internals that are pretty much par for the course in a lower end Android phone at the moment: a Qualcomm 7227 600MHz CPU, with 512MB of RAM and around 2-300MB of user space free (plus SD card support) – on the back there’s a five megapixel camera. On the top, you’ll find a 3.5mm audio port and micro USB slot.
The INQ Cloud Touch looks a lot different form most however: it’s sporting a smooth, bright plastic backing in very much the same vein as the casing of the INQ Chat 3G, while the select button on the front is in the shape of INQ’s logo. It’s not for everyone, no, but we like the cheery colours (You can get black, red and white cases for it).
If the INQ Cloud Touch has a fatal flaw in a low price Android phone, it’s the screen: it’s a HVGA (320×480) 3.5-inch capacitive display, which puts it behind the curve compared to the incredible 800×480 OLED display on the £99 ZTE-built Orange San Francisco. There’s no getting round it: you can see the grainy pixels. INQ is selling the phone on experience of course, and it would be hard to match a huge manufacturer like ZTE for scales of economy, but we do wonder if people will notice this disparity testing phones out in the shop. We shall see.
Software
INQ’s point of differentiate has always been software: it made Brew OS usable with its first three handsets, bringing Facebook to the forefront, and with the INQ Cloud Touch, it’s going all out to make Android more user friendly, and we can’t deny that that’s something it could do with.
The INQ Cloud Touch runs Android 2.2, though we understand that INQ is considering a 2.3 Gingerbread upgrade – and as you would imagine, it’s extremely heavily skinned. Let’s go through the features.
This is the biggie: if you don’t want to use Facebook, then you’re all but killing the point of the INQ Cloud Touch. By default, you’ll find widgets for People, Events, Notifications and Places on your homescreen. Most of them do what you’d expect, but the People widget is unique to the INQ Cloud Touch and worthy of note: it’s very visual, with images taking the lead. If you opt in, Facebook’s social graph works out the five people you interact with most and puts them in there for you, and you can expand this to 25, or add people manually. The result is a news feed that looks nice, containing gossip from the people you’re friends with Facebook who actually are your friends – an important distinction.
The carousel at the bottom of the launcher on the INQ Cloud Touch meanwhile contains deep links to Facebook services, not just the Facebook application: you can jump to Facebook Chat, your profile, messages, notifications and photos with a click. It’s a thoughtful touch for the social networking obsessed.
There’s plenty to keep people happy here, and we have to say it’s smartly done compared to the likes of Motoblur and HTC Sense, even if there’s no equivalent Twitter integration. We understand that because it’s based on the native Facebook Android app, you’ll get the new features any Android owners will get in future updates right away too.
Spotify
Those Spotify INQ rumours are true too: the INQ Cloud Touch has a heavy reliance on the Spotify Android app. In fact, it’s the default music player, because it can now play locally stored music files too, and it can be launched from the media key on the side of the phone. The native Android music player is still in there, but you won’t see it unless you seek it out, and it’s one of Android’s weakest features anyway so it won’t be missed. We love Spotify on Android, and frankly this is a very savvy move: it’ll be interesting to see how many people embrace Spotify Premium because of it.
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We also understand INQ will be providing a Wi-Fi sync solution for PC and Mac for those who don’t want to use Spotify, but we didn’t see this in operation.
The new box for the INQ Cloud Touch looks gorgeous, as you'd expect
Wi-Fi Manager
There’s a dedicated “Info” key on the left hand side of the INQ Cloud Touch: give it a push and it’ll produce a colourful screen with simplified settings toggles for Wi-Fi, GPS and the like. That in itself isn’t any more useful than the regular power control widget on Android, but INQ’s made the Wi-Fi manager very user friendly. Not only does it use GPS and cell tower location to turn the Wi-Fi on and off (IE when you get home, it flicks on by default), it’ll even ping supposedly open Wi-Fi hotspots to see if they are actually open, or if there’s some form of paywall, which is certainly handy for when you’re out and about.
Granted, Wi-Fi location switching is something you can do with any Android phone using the brilliant Tasker app, but it’s complicated to use: this is easy by comparison, and that’s the point.
INQ Type
INQ Type is the company’s own form of universal search on the INQ Cloud Touch, and unusually, it’s summoned by sliding up from the capacitive panel below the screen, like on a Palm webOS phone. Type in a word and it’ll whittle down your options – and then offer you the option to save, search or share. Save lets you store what you’ve typed as a note, while share lets you sling your words onto social networks.
Speaking of the keyboard that pops up with INQ Type: it’s a custom QWERTY powered by Touch Type, which tries to predict the next word you write. We can’t say we cared for the design of the keys themselves, but we’d definitely have to give Touch Type a long trial before we can objectively compare it to the fantastic stock Android 2.3 keyboard.
Verdict
The INQ Cloud Touch is definitely one to watch: while its previous handsets were dubbed “Facebook phones”, none came close to matching the power of Facebook’s iPhone apps. That wasn’t the point – but now Android is so affordable, the potential for the INQ Cloud Touch to be the phone of choice for all Facebook fanatics is there. We’ll be sure to let you know whether it lives up to this in a full INQ Cloud Touch review in due course.
