Reviewed: iNQ Cloud Touch

by missallen    No Comments

The iNQ Cloud Touch isn’t a phone I’d ever heard of before I received one to review. In fact, I’d never heard of iNQ at all. This isn’t saying much, as being a bit of an Apple fangirl I tend to ignore most other phone brands.

The Cloud Touch is a budget Android smartphone, with a choice of casing colours: red, white and black. The phone is very heavily linked to your Facebook account – it’s no wonder the phone has been dubbed “The Facebook Phone”. The home screen displays the latest news from your feed, with links to your Facebook friends, events, notifications and places. Sliding left gives you a Google search screen with icons leading to YouTube, Gmail, Maps and the all-important Android Market. Sliding right gives you quick access to the phone’s built in Spotify controls and yet more social media icons. For an entry-level phone, it really seems to pack a punch when it comes to features.

The phone’s Spotify features seem to only be available to those with paid accounts, so being the cheapskate that I am I wasn’t able to test them.  They seem to be well integrated into the phone, and it’s clear to see how you’d use everything.

Now for the boring bits: a button on the side of the phone takes you straight to a nicely designed, colourful settings page. There are a lot of simple toggle controls which make it easy to do things like turn vibrate, Bluetooth, airplane mode and silent mode on and off. There’s a whole host of other useful apps pre-downloaded such as Shazam, MSN Messenger and My Hub, the phone back-up service. The phone itself is fairly light, and the buttons are easy to use. The case is quite large, curved and easy to hold, but does feel a tiny bit cheap. It’s not a phone that feels like it would survive more than one drop on the floor. However, this doesn’t distract from the style of the phone, which is clean and simple.

Overall, it’s the kind of phone I’d be thrilled with if I hadn’t made the upgrade from pay-as-you-go. It’s not quite in the same league as the HTCs and iPhones but it’s a very good introduction to the world of Android.  I’d say it’s the perfect phone for teens – massive Facebook presence, every other kind of social media they could wish for, and it looks pretty funky. Even the grafitti-covered box is cool.  My 16 year old self gives it a huge thumbs up.