AT&T and HTC announced the first Facebook phone for the U.S., the HTC Status, yesterday, but social networkers in four other countries have had a Facebook phone for a while: the INQ Cloud Touch, which isn't coming to the U.S..
I got a chance to use it for a few days last week in Hong Kong. This is the first true Facebook phone, an affordable Android device with a custom OS skin that brings Facebook front and center. I think it could have had a great run here, but its time is running out.
The Cloud Touch is made of smooth, rounded plastic in bold red or white. In a world of nearly identitcal black phones, it really stands out, and I think that's good; we don't need more black slabs. On the front below the 3.5-inch screen, the usual Home button has been replaced by an INQ logo.
The Cloud Touch has standard entry-level Android specs; its combination of Android 2.2, a 320-by-480 screen and the 600-MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor has been successful on devices like the LG Optimus V for Virgin Mobile. The phone seemed sprightly enough for a low-end device, and generally didn't lag.
This isn't a phone for Android purists. INQ has a lot of great ideas, and isn't afraid to splash them on the home screen. The lock screen lets you immediately jump to the camera app or something called "INQ Type," which lets you enter Internet or local searches or type short memos. I found both options very useful as I snapped shots of tasty little cakes at Hong Kong bakeries, or wrote down ideas for new stories.
Head to the home screen, and you'll find that Facebook has been pulled literally front and center with a combination of new widgets and deep links. One home screen has giant, immediate links to your Facebook friends, calendar, notifications and Places, as well as highlights from your news feed and a scrolling bar of custom links letting you jump immediately to photo albums, Facebook chat and other apps.
That's a very different approach from what HTC will be doing with the Status. HTC has its Sense UI widgets, which it wants to preserve; the Facebook-centricity of the Status will be pushed off on the little Facebook hardware button. INQ forgoes hardware buttons and instead dissects Facebook into a bunch of widgets, spreading its parts all over the home screen.
The news feed widget picks out what it thinks are the most interesting items in your feed, usually things with photos; the People button, meanwhile, only scrolls through your favorite friends, which the handset either chooses automatically (and somewhat inaccurately) or lets you choose yourself (which is preferred.)
Facebook calendar and contact integration are predictably excellent. Open up any contact card and you can flip to that person's Wall or their photo albums, as well as see Facebook-centric data like their location and relationship status. The calendar integrates Facebook events, including the event walls.
Another spectacular innovation: a hard button on the side launches the best settings screen ever, a multicolored riot of very clear information including a terrific battery indicator and an easy way to connect to Wi-Fi.
INQ Cloud Touch vs. HTC Status
I haven't spent any time with the Status yet, but the Cloud Touch looks more focused on consuming Facebook data, while the Status is more focused on sharing. You can share photos and Web pages through Facebook on the Cloud Touch, but it takes up to three clicks (and the option for sharing Web pages is cleverly hidden). On the Status, it's a one-button process.
On the other hand, the Status, like other Sense UI phones, comes with widgets to display your news feed on the home screen, but not the deep shortcuts to individual Facebook features which the Cloud Touch offers.
The Cloud Touch also has Spotify baked in, but I wasn't able to try it because Spotify works in neither Hong Kong nor the U.S.
INQ's phone has some obvious problems. The 5-megapixel camera, for instance, is awful; it takes between 1.5 and two seconds to snap a shot, and the pictures are often a hideous combination of dim, hazy, and overexposed. This isn't the phone to fill your Facebook gallery with. The custom touch keyboard has a very neat predictive algorithm which tries to guess the next word in a sentence, but the keys themselves are less accurate than other Android touch keyboards I've used.
For a country with millions of Facebook users, we're awfully behind on Facebook phones. The United Kingdom already has this phone along with the HTC Salsa and ChaCha (which we know as the Status).
But although this is a pretty great phone, I don't want to see it landing in the U.S. six months from now. By then, its specs will look worse than low-end; they'll look obsolete.
INQ clearly has some unique ideas, and I think there are enough Facebook fans out there to make their next device a moderate-sized hit in the US. Let's hope the company's next attempt actually shows up at a US carrier. There are enough Facebook fanatics in the US to support more than one Facebook phone.