Hutchison coming to market with INQ Mobile devices
By Ben Robinson on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 2:58 PM PST In Devices, Services, Three
GSMworld.com has an interesting story about a new mobile handset player coming to market, backed by a seriously big parent company. The vendor will be called INQ Mobile (check out their holding website here), and Hutchison is the parent company – so you can expect a seriously competent “connected” device (or devices!) from them…
On the back of the success with 3’s Skyephone (3 obviously being another subsidiary of Hutchison), you can expect that the “social” connectively will be in the form of integrated apps like Facebook, Instant Messengers, and VoIP (probably Skype).
Apparently, according to Reuters, the first HSPA phone will be coming in the UK and Australia for year-end, and then onwards to other operators next year. It is claimed there are four more phones coming next year with a sub-$200 price-tag. For those interested, Flextronics and Foxconn will be an device production duties.
This should be a cracker! Knowing 3’s marketing, expect something explosive when it does go on sale!
[Via: GSMworld.com]
Ben, you might be interested to know we interviewed INQ’s new CEO, Frank Meehan, for Friday’s Newsdesk video. There’s an embargo on what we could cover, and we couldn’t show close-ups of the phone until the launch in mid November. But Frank explains about the new company, the INQ-1 phone, the state of messaging, and how the concept evolved from 3’s Skypephone of late 2006. And to clarify, it will be $200 to operators (the 3 operators first, then others in 2009). There’s a direct link to the interview at: http://web20.telecomtv.com/pages/?id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10. Cheers, Guy.