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INQ promises first Twitter handset
Published: 3 June, 2009
Tags >> Handset
Hutchison handset unit INQ has led the drive to make the mobile web experience more simple and affordable, by creating midrange phones optimized for certain key applications like Facebook and Skype. This is a strategy that has been copied by larger firms, notably Nokia, but INQ is staying a step ahead by introducing a phone for the social network of the moment, Twitter.
The Twitter phone will reach stores in time for the holiday buying season, featuring homescreen, one-touch access, and optimized performance, for the microblogging service. It will be the first mass market handset to have a Twitter client, and will cost under $140, said INQ's CEO Frank Meehan. The product will certainly be sold by Hutchison stablemate 3 in territories such as the UK and Italy, but will also be offered to other operators worldwide.
The device will use internet connections to send the 140-character messages, or tweets, that are characteristic of Twitter - contrasting with Twitter's own mobile service, which uses SMS and is not phone specific. INQ says that offering can be more expensive and cumbersome to use. "This can really help open up and drive Twitter use on mobile when usage becomes part of your data package like on the PC," Meehan said in an interview with Reuters.
INQ says it has sold 700,000 phones since it launched its first model, the Skypephone, with 3 in 2007. Its next offering was the INQ1 'Facebook phone', which integrates social networking features into the handset's address book, removing the need to log on separately. 3 UK says traffic on the INQ1 is typically three to four times higher than on other 3 phones, with 65% using Facebook regularly, while the phone is three to four times cheaper than the more famous web traffic generators like the iPhone. 3 UK marketing chief Marc Allera told Reuters that he thought only the iPhone would be comparable in its ability to generate traffic (not that 3 carries the Apple handset).
It remains to be seen whether Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which have also announced social networking handsets optimized for Facebook or MySpace, also jump on the Twitter bandwagon in time for Christmas.
