Walt and Katherine agreed that INQ has picked up both trends to create the first Social Mobile, aka “the facebook phone”.

INQ Mobile, a new Hutchison Whampoa company, is creating a category of consumer devices that put social networking, email and instant messaging at the heart of innovative mass-market mobiles. The company launched the INQ1 in October of 2008 and offers low-prizes cellphones for the facebook generation.

“More than 20 million Facebook users currently access the site through their mobile devices. This number has quadrupled over the last 12 months and we expect it to continue to grow as more people begin to connect with their friends and family through Facebook on innovative mobile devices, like the INQ,” said Henri Moissinac, director of mobile, Facebook.

“The way people communicate has evolved, but mass market devices have remained anchored to just voice and text. INQ set out to change this. We created a new mobile device platform that would transform the consumer experience with always-on, easy to use, Internet driven communication services, and we designed it to deliver positive economics to operators” said Frank Meehan, CEO of INQ Mobile.

Frank Meehan has given a speech at the Mobile World Congress in February 2009.
You can watch the full speech here.

About INQ Mobile:
INQ Mobile is a standalone company wholly owned by Hutchison Whampoa Limited. INQ Mobile is the maker of the INQ1, the world’s first Social Mobile to integrate email, IM and social networking in an intuitive way. INQ draws on the strengths of its parent company, which made an early investment in global 3G networks based on a fundamental belief that 3G changes the way people communicate and was formed to address a growing need for advanced mobile internet handsets from operators across the world.