14 DAY TRIAL // Singapore Telecommunications, the leading telecom carrier in Southeast Asia, announced today that it plans on launching the INQ Mini 3G on its airwaves. The new device, which includes a variety of social networking features, is aimed mainly at the operator's young consumers. INQ, a subsidiary of Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa, is reported to have had the device on sale only through Hutchison's operators until now.
“One of the biggest operators has chosen us. This is confirmation that we are serious,” INQ's Chief Executive Frank Meehan stated, Reuters reports. “Operators are not looking at only differentiating at the top-end, but now they look at many different price levels,” Meehan said. The INQ Mini 3G is expected to become available for purchase in Singapore later this week, yet no details on its pricing have been unveiled for the moment.
On the other hand, it should be noted that INQ already stated that the handset would come very cheap for carriers, which should drive its adoption among them. The INQ Mini 3G arrives to the market with an Internet-based Twitter client (the same as the INQ Chat 3G), which should send 140-character messages using an Internet connection, and not send them as text messages in the same manner as Twitter's own service does, Reuters reports.
As many of you might already know, social networking sites have seen a great adoption among mobile phone users during the ongoing year, which determined more manufacturers to include such capabilities in their devices. INQ has another mobile phone with social networking capabilities available on the market, namely the INQ1 model, called the Facebook phone.
The company's handsets integrate the social networking services into the address book so that users will benefit from instant access to them. As mentioned before, INQ also intends to come to the market with a device powered by Google's Android operating system, yet we will be able to see the phone on store shelves only next year.