Posts tagged a-lot-like

by Sascha Segan

INQ, makers of the “Facebook phone,” plan to put out a heavily customized Android-based smartphone in 2010, INQ CEO Frank Meehan said in an exclusive interview with PCMag.com Thursday.

“We came to the conclusion that aside from licensing Palm [WebOS], which is a fairly difficult thing to do, Android was really most suited for our plans with touch-screen devices,” he said.

While INQ hasn’t cracked the U.S. market yet, their phones have a lot of buzz overseas. The company, a spinoff from international megacarrier Hutchinson, makes low-cost feature phones, which tightly integrate with Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and other social networks.

INQ already has a strong strategy for what Meehan calls “the sub-$49 and under market in the U.S.,” and they plan to introduce phones here next year. They turned to Android as part of their next move, into “the $79-99-199 on two-year-contract range,” which they see as dominated by low-cost smartphones in the future.

A New Kind of Droid

INQ looked at several smartphone OS options before turning to Android, Meehan said. Windows Mobile was too hard to customize properly. LiMo wasn’t stable enough yet. Licensing Palm’s WebOS seemed like too much of a trial. And Android has a strong, enthusiastic developer community who are just looking for someone to put their house in order, Meehan said.

The company’s version of Android might not look a lot like the Android you see on the T-Mobile G1, Meehan said. Android allows manufacturers to customize it heavily, though nobody’s done that yet outside China.

That means changing even core Android applications like the phone book, to enable INQ’s signature social-networking integration.

“You just make a new set of APIs available, and you link. We’re working with some developers already in the Android world to enhance it. They can see what the iPhone is, and they would love to be coding for something like that,” Meehan said.

Android Market also needs help, which may mean a new face for the 7,000-app store, or starting an entirely new store, Meehan said.

“We’re examining lots of different options, but we’ve got to fix that marketplace issue,” he said. “Google has to improve it, or if they don’t, someone’s got to improve it for them.”

Of course, once you start really reworking Android, you run into the danger of “forking” the code – making your version of Android so different that it can’t work with Google’s own updates.

“The holy grail is enough compatibility with Google so it doesn’t incur too many costs, but certainly shakes up the contact list,” he said.

Since INQ comes out of the wireless carrier world, they can speak carriers’ language too, Meehan said, helping the carriers offer affordable smartphones with compelling services that don’t treat carriers as dumb pipes. That’s going to help them in the US market, he said.

“We can beat Nokia and Sony Ericsson and Motorola at this … we’re small, we’re nimble, and we’re fast,” Meehan said.