The INQ Cloud Touch is the British phone maker’s first, long awaited foray into Android. All this time, it’s been working hand in hand with Facebook to craft a software skin that puts your social networking buddies at the fore – and by and large, it’s pulled it off.
The INQ Cloud Touch is an ace Facebook phone (if not the definitive article), and one filled with clever touches that make it all the more human. Should you settle for the screen though? Is it worth holding out for the HTC ChaCha instead? Let’s take a look.
See the best INQ Cloud Touch deals here
Hardware
Unless you happen to have a fetish for brightly coloured plastic, the hardware on the INQ Cloud Touch is not going to impress you – indeed, you might even loathe it by the end of a two year contract.
It’s not that anything is missing – apart from a dedicated Facebook button, if that’s what you value most. You’ll find a 3.5mm audio jack on the top, a volume rocker on the right and an unusual overview and media player button on the left and right sides respectively. It’s just cheap and cheery, and for those lusting after the unibody looks of a HTC phone or the beautiful glass of an iPhone, it won’t appeal. It does at least shrug off fingerprints, and feels sturdy enough to survive a clatter to the concrete.
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Sadly the problem that we have is the one we saw coming ever since the INQ Cloud Touch was announced in February: the screen. The HVGA (480×420) resolution 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen is perfectly responsive, but very grainy by today’s standards (Some phones now offer 960×540 panels). It’s a noticeable issue on websites and reading long emails – certainly if you’ve ever owned a phone with a WVGA (800×480) display, you won’t want to settle for less.
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But that’s OK, since that isn’t everyone. It’s not the dealbreaker it is on a flagship piece of hardware like the BlackBerry Torch 9800. INQ knows it can’t compete with the big fish on scales of economy. What it can do is make the software shine.
Android
The INQ Cloud Touch runs Android 2.2 on a Qualcomm 7227 600MHz chipset, just like a bunch of smartphones, including the lacklustre LG Optimus One. But INQ’s been biding its time, crafting a software overlay that manages to make the lack of Android 2.3 a complete non-issue – INQ does plan to offer a Gingerbread upgrade however. This is just a friendly smartphone, regardless of build.
INQ hasn’t tampered with the launcher too much – you get your standard five (maximum seven) homescreens, plus a scrolling carousel dock at the bottom filled with shortcuts. Pinching the screen still zooms out to an overview, and the company hasn’t made any drastic changes to the pull down notification bar.
But it’s added plenty elsewhere. The dedicated settings key brings up a colourful and easy to grasp overview of connection and storage status, and from here it’s a short jump to the impressive Wi-Fi Manager, which can turn off Wi-Fi when you leave a hotspot, and power back on when you arrive in another, or alert you to an available open network.
The lock screen lets you slide up to unlock to the homescreen, the search function or the camera, which loads surprisingly sharpish, even if the results from the five megapixel camera sans flash are washy to say the best.
Spotify meanwhile is the standard music player – even without a Premium subscription it works well, since it sucks in music on the SD card, boasts a homescreen widget and can be launched and controlled from the music button on the right side of the phone. You should upgrade though: unlimited music on tap really is an incredible thing.
Then there’s the clever search function, INQ Type. Fire this up, or launch it straight from the homescreen, and you can search on Google or the handset, immediately share your update or save it to the clipboard or to contacts, giving you a handy way to jot down memos. INQ’s keyboard is an elegant solution for a smallish 3.5-inch screen as well: it’s a SwiftKey powered QWERTY that predicts the next word in a sentence, not just the one you’re typing. It’s not ideal for writing lengthy emails about an unusual topic (Something to do with your line of work, say), but with a few hours’ use, it becomes eerily adept at guessing what you’re going to say in a text message.
See our best Android phone: budget Top 5 here
As we’ve noted before, much of this is achievable on other Android phones with the right apps and settings tweaking. But that’s not the point: you get these out of the box, and we wish all Android phones came with them preloaded.
One thing to note – the low power chipset means that Flash isn’t supported on the device.
We had to give this its own break out section, since it’s so comprehensive. INQ worked closely with Facebook to bring the social network to the front and centre of the phone, and it’s succeeded. Log in once, and by default your central homescreen will be populated with all sorts of juicy info.
It’s essentially two large widgets: one is a very visual representation of your news feed, complete with images and video thumbnails, while the other provides quick shortcuts to People, Calendar, Notifications and Places. You could of course trash these widgets, but that really would be defying the point of this phone.
While the central widget is an improvement on the standard Facebook Android widget, our favourite new section is People, which uses Facebook’s new algorithms to show which five friends you have most contact with on the platform, and show you the latest from these mates. You can add more friends and include others manually as well – it’s a very handy way to catch up with your actual friends on Facebook, in between all the illiterates you knew at primary school.
But Facebook integration goes much deeper than that though, with Facebook events and birthdays populating your calendar, and our favourite part, individual shortcuts to the various sections within Facebook – Places, Chat and so forth. It’s extremely handy if you’re a heavy user to have these separate services almost acting as apps of their own accord, within one tap from the dock.
The thing is, while this is all good and well, it really does leave the native Android app looking like an embarrassment. Naturally some of this wouldn’t be feasible on an iPhone, but why doesn’t every Android phone get specific widgets? Why did it take a (comparatively) small British company with no prior Android experience to show Facebook, a $70bn global company, this was possible?
Oh well. Hopefully, the social networking giant is doing something very secretly about this.
Battery life and call quality
The 1300mAh battery on the INQ Cloud Touch is certainly capable of pushing you Facebook updates to your phone, and juggling your calls and emails for a day and half, if not two if you pace yourself with your Spotify streaming. That’s what you’d expect from a low power phone with a small capacity battery, and it’s enough. We were much more pleased with the speaker quality: calls sound great, and even music played through the loudspeakers doesn’t get too raspy. If playing music on the back of the bus is your thing, thats one for the Pro column.
Verdict
While the INQ Cloud Touch’s software is a joy to use, it’s not so affordable that we’d opt for one over the stunning Orange San Francisco from ZTE. We’d also urge you to take a look at the screen in store to see if your eyes are offended by it or not. But if you’re a Facebook fiend, who spends more time on the social network than gaming, messaging or just, you know, talking to people, it’s a winner.
