A few people have asked me about my first impressions of the INQ1; including @jonprevans and @msonline_uk, so here’s a mini review. I chose it mainly because I couldn’t justify the £35/month contract for the iPhone. It’s dubbed as the ‘Facebook’ phone, but I’d rather overlook that stigma since I suspect that’s just because the phone is definitely tailored to suit the needs of the stereotypical Facebook addict. Whilst I have a FB account, I’m not totally fussed about having it with me all the time. It’s definitely not an iPhone rival, although by offering up similar features it’s hard not to compare it against it.
Overlooking the obvious like the loss of the multi-touch screen, and looks, the INQ1 boasts some functionality that I’d miss on the iPhone, like being able to have both my Hotmail (as well as gMail) pop up on the phone when I get new mail; AFAIK the iPhone doesn’t support Hotmail through it’s own email client. However, it only looks in the ‘inbox’ folder for both accounts; neglecting the folders that I’d set up to filter certain mail directly into.
Like a lot of other mobiles, there’s support for some Java based Google apps including Mail, Maps, YouTube and Docs. The maps are fine, and do offer good directions; however I feel that other than basic walking directions, it’d be rather useless if I really needed it as it relies on the network to download the maps. YouTube is designed for mobile phones, and uses a 3gp codec to stream the video. When in good signal areas, it streams fine, albeit at a lower resolution than you’d find on the iPhone. However, it struggles to even load the page when the signal’s weak. Google Docs is available to view documents already posted to the services, however there’s currently no way to edit documents on the fly. Another featured app worth mentioning is last.fm, which bolts onto the music area of the phone. Whilst I’ve found that scrobbling tracks on the device is fine, I haven’t yet found a way to stream friends/neighbours/tagged radio stations, like what is offered on the iPhone equivalent.
I downloaded Opera Mini to browse generally, which comes in useful for posting to Twitter. However, the downside of having no dedicated app for Twitter is the lack of ability to post images/links to Twitter from the phone. I do like being able to download podcasts directly to the device via the web browser, but it’d be nice if there was an option to incorporate the RSS feed readers into a podcast client to download the shows automatically. Having said that, I think I’d rather use it as an occasional thing as there’s no way to connect your own earphones; only the bundled earphones which connect to the mini USB port. Talking of mini, I’ve found a new pet hate for storage devices as the phone uses Micro SD cards, which are proclaimed to be the smallest in the world. So small in fact that they’re hardly swappable for fear of losing them, that’s if you can even get them back out of the phone.
In some ways, I wish I’d gotten the iPhone, if only because the iPhone set a pretty high bench mark to compare phones with. Considering the actual specs of the phone, it’s only a minor upgrade to my old phone, but the unlimited data (which comes in handy to check mail out and about) and SMS push it up a notch. Hopefully these perks will be enough to keep me satisfied with it for the next 18months of the contract. Being my first contract phone that feels like a long time before I can upgrade, despite the fact that it’s how long I’ve held onto my W810.
