MWC: Social Call

Our last meeting of the day was with INQ Mobile, the Hutchison-Whampoa-owned handset maker that released its first, and so far only, handset, the ‘Social Mobile’ in the UK in November, describing it at the time as: “the world’s most advanced social networking mobile phone.”As regular readers will know, we don’t spend a massive amount of time covering handsets – we figure there are enough gadget sites to do that - but I was interested to know what makes a social networking phone a social networking phone, and INQ Marketing & Strategy Director Jeff Taylor was on hand to explain. There’s more to the phone, in fact, than meets the eye. Taylor told me that the device nothing less than an attempt to help mobile networks move the majority of their users onto data plans. “The operators have pretty much failed to sell the mobile Internet,” Taylor told me. “So rather than loading more and more features onto high-end devices, we set out to launch an affordable one that makes it easy for regular people to use the mobile web.”At £79, or free on a £15 per month contract with 3 in the UK, the phone is certainly affordable. But what is it about the phone that makes it easier to use the web?“The key barrier to uptake is that the customer has to learn new behaviours,” says Taylor. “So we have built the mobile web into the places the customer goes.”This breaks down into three areas: the address book, the inbox, and the idle screen. The address book lists all the user’s contacts, and against each, he can see whether they are on Facebook, Instant Messenger or other communications services. If the contact in question is on Facebook, the user can get straight to their Facebook page with one click, without the need to launch an application. If the friend calls, the phone will automatically retrieve his Facebook photo and assign it to his contact entry. There’s one inbox for everything, including emails, texts, Facebook updates and IM messages. Each has its own folder, but the user can see everything at the top level. The idle screen has several widgets, updating things such as the weather and Facebook status updates every 20 minutes or so. Thanks to a traffic management system, says Taylor, the phone does not pull down large amounts of data to do this. After the UK launch, the phone was rolled out in Australia and Ireland, with Hong Kong and Italy next on the list. Other devices are also planned, and Taylor says the company is offering the handset to non-Hutchison networks. Most tellingly, he says, INQ is seeing “incredibly high activation” of the data service among users.What I liked about the phone was the thought process that’s gone into the design and, in particular, the user interface. It reminds me of a story I heard about someone being asked if they ever used the mobile web and replying that they didn’t. When questioned further, it transpired that they went on the operator’s portal several times every weekend to check the football scores, they just didn’t realise that was the mobile web. The more seamless, transparent and idiot-proof the networks can handset-makers can make the process of accessing data online from your phone, the more people will do it, to the benefit of everyone in the mobile marketing value chain. Who knows, Taylor and his colleagues at INQ might just achieve their aim of moving the majority of users on to data plans, no matter how unlikely that might seem.
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