INQ Chat 3G

The Chat 3G looks absolutely stunning with the black and

dark red color combination with a silver band running on the sides. It is one of

the few phones that can make the Blackberry look bad. The well spaced QWERTY

keypad, large soft keys and easy to use navigation pad make this phone a joy to

operate. The landscape display has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels which is

legible under direct sunlight. On the left is the mini-USB port and volume keys

and on the right is the switcher key. Sadly, the volume adjustment keys on the

side are too small. On the back is the 3.2MP AF camera along with a speaker

grill.

The Chat 3G has BREW platform with a user interface which

is a breath of fresh air. The main menu is graphical with large color icons

which turn black and white when selected. The home screen is much like a

Blackberry with a quick launcher at the bottom. On the home screen itself a user

can add widgets of his choice including Cricket, Facebook, Twitter, and up to 3

RSS feed updates.

What is further impressive is the Facebook integration.

Once a user adds his Facebook account on the phone, Facebook direct messages,

wall posts, pokes and requests can be accessed through the unified inbox. The

Chat 3G also comes with Twitter and Orkut apps for social networking, Cricinfo

app for cricket updates and even boasts of push mail. It allows a user to setup

his Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL mail accounts as well as corporate mail

accounts.

The loudspeaker on the back and the in-ear speaker for

voice calls has a loud volume output with superb clarity.

The 3.2MP AF camera fails to impress. The images snapped

are of average quality.  Video recording is at 176 x 144 pixel resolution

maximum which is another let down.

The phone even comes with inbuilt GPS that can be used with

Google maps and is 3G ready which are rare feature to be available at this price

point.

Sadly, the phone fails on multiple fronts including its

core functionalities. The graphical user interface is a bit sluggish and it

keeps getting slower as more and more apps are left running in the background.

The core functionality which is its social network capabilities are crippled as

the phone fails to show the latest updates on its home screen widgets. In our

use, the phone was showing Facebook updates older than 3 days even after a

couple of repeated update status attempts. The Twitter application failed to

update at all multiple times with a network error and when it did update, it did

not keep refreshing with latest tweets. The phone failed to pick up a signal in

a basement where a MicroMax Q5 was showing full signal strength on Vodafone.

Shockingly, even after master reset of the phone, all the setting for mail,

Facebook and Twitter did not get removed.

Most of the issues that plague the phone are most likely

due to the poor service and coverage of Aircel. Sadly, the phone is locked on

Aircel, had it not been so, maybe the INQ device would have worked better with

services offered by other network providers.