INQ Chat 3G Review

This is the fairly new INQ Chat 3G mobile phone. Made by the company INQ Mobile which is owned by the carrier Three.

We played with the INQ Chat 3G for a couple of days and it surprised us in a good way. In the end, however, we did have to return it because of the Swedish carrier not properly supporting it. This phone is very inexpensive. It is easy to get free on a cheap contract with a small data plan.

The box it comes in is beautiful. It reminds us of the iPhone box but with a bolder design. The first picture in this review shows you the manual spread around the phone. The manual is a bunch of nice looking cards. A different approach than the normal boring manuals you usually see.

So lets get to the phone. As you might have noticed it is similar to a blackberry and devices with a full qwerty keyboard. The keyboard is surprisingly good considering the price of the phone. The operating system is based on the BREW-platform. INQ has however made their own GUI on top of this platform. We were told that the GUI would be slow in use. This was not the case. Yes the menus would lag when using a lot of widgets and applications at the same time (the phone is a multitasking monster) but under normal use it was responsive enough for our taste.

If you haven’t figured it out already this phone is all about social networking. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Live Messenger, GMail and a lot more. The setup of all these services was a breeze and everything worked really nice with one exception. All of the networks in Sweden (where we are) are co-owned by different carriers. The problem is that the INQ Chat 3G labels these networks as roaming networks and the phone has a lot of security measures built in to stop data usage while roaming. This little quirk really screws up this otherwise great phone (for the price). We’ve heard that this problem exists in some other places and even in the UK in some locations. It’s a real show stopper as the phone keeps asking you if you want to connect to every service and push email doesn’t work at all. This is something you have to look out for. A firmware fix might be in the works. Read more about it in INQ:s support forum.

This is the back of the phone. You can buy different coloured back covers, there are a bunch of bright colours to choose from. Be aware of the fact that we couldn’t get the cover packs for the INQ Chat 3G yet, they weren’t available. Hopefully they will surface soon but unless you want a red phone you might want to look into this before buying.

The back is pushed of easily and it does creak a little bit in use, but not to bad, we’ve seen worse. We didn’t get a mini-SD card with the phone but you are free to put in your own. We used a 4GB SDHC without any problems.

The back illumination of the qwerty keyboard is nice and bright. The screen is not the best but good considering the price. It’s very bright and we did not have any problems using it outside.

Eventually we returned the phone as the roaming network issue bugged the hell out of us. Without this problem we would recommend this phone for someone on a low budget. It’s no iPhone but you get connected to all your social networks for not a lot of dough.

We also suspect that this phone relabelled and refocused as a small business phone could work really well. There are many people who just need a qwerty keyboard and good email capabilities.

New iPhone charger

We just received the new iPhone box here in Sweden. The box is roughly half the size of the old one. The thinner profile is because of the new EU charger that you can see below. Substantially smaller than the old one. Apple probably makes a few bucks extra because of the smaller packaging. The slimmer charger is nice however . We all know the iPhone battery doesn’t last long. Now it’s easier to bring the charger with you.