14 DAY TRIAL // One of the Facebook-oriented smartphones manufactured by INQ, the Cloud Touch, is now available for purchase in UK.
The handset can be bought for £299.95 ($589) SIM-free and unlocked, or obtained for free on £18 ($29) per month agreements.
INQ's Cloud Touch is the first handset to hit the market that has been designed specifically for Facebook users.
However, more devices are expected in the coming months, including the INQ Cloud Q in June, which was already confirmed by Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy retailers.
More advanced Facebook phones from HTC will also go live in Q2 2011. The HTC Salsa and the HTC ChaCha handsets that were introduced at the 2011 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are expected to increase the competition on this niche market.
To make things more interesting, it appears that Facebook itself is still thinking of adapting the social network to its own Android phone in the near future.
Furthermore, other Facebook phones are expected to arrive by the end of 2011, as Mark Zuckerberg suggested back in February.
“A lot has been made about an individual Facebook phone, but we’re going to see multiple devices this year. The ones that are best are the ones that jump in and are social from the ground up,” he said.
Spec-wise, the Cloud Touch features a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen with 262K colors support and 480 x 320 pixels resolution. The phone runs Android 2.2 Froyo and is powered by an 800MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 processor.
It also packs 512MB of storage, a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and video recording capabilities, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 8GB), as well as a 4GB microSD card bundled in the box.
The 3G-enabled smartphone offers a wide range of connectivity options such as: WiFi, GPS, microUSB and Bluetooth.