INQ Cloud Touch deals & review

INQ is a small company which, prior to the Cloud Touch and Cloud Q, had only released two handsets. The INQ Chat and INQ Mini were heavily centred on messaging and at the time featured novel social networking integration. The Cloud Touch, and the Cloud Q, has taken this to a whole new level with Facebook functionality woven into virtually every aspect of the phones. Competing with the likes of the HTC Salsa and HTC Chacha, even with their dedicated Facebook buttons, the INQ Cloud Touch feels a lot more worthy of the title of "Facebook phone".

The Cloud Touch runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo) and is powered by a 600MHz processor. Not that you would really recognise the Cloud Touch as an Android phone, as the INQ interface in use has had a dramatic overhaul to bring every aspect of Facebook into prominence. Unlike many phones with Facebook support, the INQ Cloud specifically renders Facebook pages to make them fit more perfectly with the interface. The Cloud Touch also makes use of Facebook´s Social Graph API which can display your most interacted with friends first when you load the Facebook app.

The interface features a Visual Media Feed which will provide you with up to date information regarding the activity of your Facebook friends. You can also get quick access to Friends, Events, Places and Notifications from the phones homescreen, as well as excellent support for Facebook Chat. Photos and videos captured on the INQ Cloud´s 5 megapixel camera can be easily uploaded to share on Facebook. The camera comes with geo-tagging support as well as an autofocus.

Another great feature of the INQ Cloud Touch is the Fluency enabled INQ Type onscreen keyboard. This learns the nature of your typing to help improve suggestions significantly increasing typing speed. You can also swipe up the screen to open a text pad, type away and then decide what you wish to do with the text afterwards. You can save it, share it or search for it in Google.

All of this excellent Facebook support would be pretty useless without some good internet connectivity and thankfully this is provided on the INQ Cloud Touch through 3G and Wi-Fi. Other connectivity options available include microUSB and Bluetooth with A2DP (for wireless headphones) as well as GPRS and EDGE.

The INQ Cloud Touch has a fairly limited amount of internal storage space at just 40MB. However, this is upgradable with microSD cards to 8GB and a 4GB microSD card is included with the phone. Although this may seem lower than many other competing phones you may actually need less space on the INQ Cloud Touch as the proprietary media player has been replaced with Premium Spotify. There is also a dedicated Spotify button on the phone which can be used to quickly load the application.

HTC also announced its own Facebook Phones at a similar time to INQ´s Cloud Touch and Cloud Q. While these feature dedicated Facebook buttons, great Facebook Chat support and a much easier photo uploading procedure it would be wrong to ignore the fact that INQ´s Facebook handsets do offer a great deal more functionality and support for the increasingly popular social network.