INQ Mobile

» see inqmobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Facebook phone was a genre before it was ever a product. From about 2009 there was a rumor about one every six months, always with a mockup attached, always sourced to somebody close to the project. What almost nobody outside Britain noticed is that the thing had already shipped, from a company that got there first and got nothing for it.

INQ was founded in London in 2008 by Ken Johnstone, alongside Frank Meehan and Jeff Taylor, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa. That parentage explains its entire footprint. Hutchison ran the 3 network in Britain and Italy among other markets, INQ handsets went out through those networks, and Turkey was not one of them. This was a carrier product built in a carrier's own workshop, so it stops exactly where the carrier stopped.

The INQ1 arrived in December 2008. Nobody would have called it a smartphone at the time. It had a numeric keypad under a small screen and a price that put it in the free-on-contract tier. What it had instead was Facebook and Skype wired into the phone itself rather than parked in a menu of downloadable extras, with Last.fm and Windows Live Messenger sitting next to them. Your Facebook friends appeared in your address book. Status updates were a thing the phone did, not a thing an app did.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

In February 2009 the GSMA gave the INQ1 its phone of the year award in Barcelona, over every flagship in the building. The judges cited the price next to the depth of the social integration, which was a polite way of saying that a cheap feature phone had understood what people used their phones for better than the expensive ones had.

That was the high point and it held for about eighteen months. The INQ Chat 3G added a QWERTY keyboard for people who were typing more than they were calling. The INQ Cloud Touch, in 2011, moved the whole idea onto Android with a Facebook feed as the home screen and Spotify built in. By then the problem was visible from a distance. Everything INQ had been praised for in 2009 was now a free app that ran on any handset in the shop.

~ the pivot ~

In September 2010 the rumor mill decided INQ was building the official Facebook phone. It never happened, and the reason is the whole company in one line. Facebook did not need a hardware partner selling through one European carrier. It needed to be on every phone in every country, and it got there without paying anybody for the privilege.

INQ stopped making handsets in January 2013 and turned itself into a software house. It shipped Material, a personalized news discovery app, and SO.HO, a social home screen launcher for Android. Both were competent. Both were competing directly against Facebook's own launcher work, which shipped as Facebook Home in April 2013 and was itself dead inside a year.

~ what it became ~

Material and SO.HO were closed at the end of January 2014 and the company went with them, on the 31st. The statement said the technology had greater application within the wider Hutchison group, which is what a parent writes when it is absorbing the useful parts and retiring the letterhead. By that point the staff numbered somewhere between eleven and fifty people across London and Rome.

What INQ proved, five years before anyone would credit it, is that people wanted their contacts and their social accounts to be one list rather than two. Every phone sold today does this, and none of them advertises it, because it stopped being a feature and turned into plumbing. INQ built an entire company on something that was only ever going to be a checkbox.

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