A Twitter-phone? Yes, from INQ Mobile

As Cell phone maker INQ Mobile planning, an introduction of its new Twitter phone will be done during the Christmas sales season. In that way it hopes to benefit from surging interest in the micro-blogging service, as INQ's head said.

According to Frank Meehan, CEO of INQ, this model will be first mass-telephone with an Internet-based Twitter client. It will cost operators less than $140. The phone will use Internet connections for sending the 140-character messages, called Tweets, not text messages as in Twitter's own service.

"This can really help open up and drive Twitter use on mobile when usage becomes part of your data package like on the PC," he said.

Meehan also added that INQ has sold 700,000 phones since the 2007 introduction of the Skype phone. In addition to Twitter phone INQ plans to introduce another new model for the Christmas market.

INQ was the first who moved to produce reasonable priced phones for connecting to social networks and the Internet in general. "INQ Mobile was the first to offer an affordable handset that appeals to the connected generation that wants instant access to web services such as Facebook and Skype," said Ben Wood, research director at consultancy CCS Insight.

Its INQ1 model, dubbed the Facebook phone, is winner of the Mobile World Congress trade show in February as the best handset. That model integrated key features of Facebook into the phone's address book. So the user of the phone needn’t to log on to the service separately. As Marc Allera, director of sales and marketing at operator 3 UK, said the traffic numbers from INQ1 were usually three to four times higher than from other phones. "On usual smartphones the Internet experience is in no way close and their price is 3-4 times higher," Allera said.