INQ Mini 3G deals & review

A very, very cheap phone that manages to also be extremely effective at what it does. If you´re a regular on social networking sites or find yourself emailing from your phone all the time, this little thing is going to make all that a whole lot easier than ever before.

Add to that some solid design and fun swappable covers and you´ve got a nifty little device indeed

Specs

• 102.9mm x 45.8mm x 12.8mm
• Active address book is presence-enabled showing live status from all your contacts, letting you chose how to contact them
• Built-in plug and play HSDPA modem to give your PC wireless broadband access
• 2.2” QVGA TFT landscape display
• 2.0 megapixel camera
• 100Mb user memory (expandable to 8GB)
• Brew 4.0 and Java MIDP 2.0 for application development multitasking supported by dedicated Switcher hard key
• Download support
• Audio: AMR, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+(Audio only), MIDI, MP3, wav
• Video: MPEG4, H.263, H.264
• Streaming:
• Audio: AMR, AAC, AAC+, EAAC+(Audio only)
• Video: MPEG4, H.263, H.264

Details

INQ’s ground-breaking (and award winning) phone platform was built from scratch for mobile access to the internet, and to social networking, messaging and email sites specifically, and so offers unprecedented integration throughout the handset. Popular internet applications are not simply bolted on (as they are with proprietary systems which are primarily voice and text) - but embedded within the underlying software, delivering benefits such as native messaging and an address book that consolidates phone contacts with those from relevant applications. This allows INQ to remove many of the cumbersome steps that have made using these services on ordinary mobiles frustrating or time-consuming. INQ phones multi-task, so key applications like Facebook, Skype, IM and email are ‘always on’ and accessible with one click from the home screen. It can also be used as a tethered modem on a laptop. And the fact that it´s launching on 3 means you´ll be getting free Skype calls as part of the package as well.

All sound tempting to you? Well... wait til you see the price on this thing! Because while it´s very, very good at doing all the things detailed above, this phone isn´t going to set the world on fire in any other area. The camera´s functional but basic, there´s no Wi-Fi or GPS onboard and, well, that´s about it. But all this really shouldn´t matter to you if all you want is a phone that´s as well connected as any other out there in terms of fully integrated support for Facebook, Twitter, Skype, popular email clients and instant messaging. If you need high end specs, then you should look elsewhere, but – if like us – you realise that few people end up using the features they end up paying through the nose for, then the Mini 3G could be just what you need.

While the Mini 3G isn´t really as "Mini" as the name suggests (it´s about the same size as most conventional monoblock phones, at 103 x 46 x 13mm), it´s still a very palm and pocket friendly handset. And the interchangeable covers are fun, coming in seven colours that range from the silly to the plain eye-hurting. In fact, these swappable covers and the sheer robustness of this handset remind us of the good old days of Nokia phones that you could personalise to your heart´s content, whilst also knowing that the thing was going to last far longer than even the longest contract. Again, something that´s very rare to find these days.

Conclusion

Strangely enough, one of our new favourite phones. Simple, unpretentious, but still incredibly useful for what it does.

And, quite simply, cheap as chips!