“If you go to a nightclub in any city in the world, the pretty girl has an iPhone or a BlackBerry,” Meehan told Mashable at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “She doesn’t have an Android phone. She has no emotional attachment to an Android phone. It’s too complicated. It’s a geek device, it’s all wrong.”
Pretty strong words from anyone at the Android-centric MWC — let alone someone making Android handsets himself. Meehan is the founder and CEO of INQ, the London-based company behind the INQ Cloud. The Cloud, launching in Europe this year, has been dubbed an unofficial Facebook phone that incorporates features from the social network directly into its user interface. Facebook Chat, Calendar and News Feeds are accessible as their own apps, and the phone uses Facebook’s social graph technology to create screens for the friends you most care about. (We have a hands-on preview with a pre-release INQ Cloud here.)
As critics point out, the INQ Cloud isn’t that powerful under the hood. Its chipset clocks in at a weedy 600MHz. The expandable memory starts at a mere 4MB. But Meehan says such specs talk misses the point.
“Android manufacturers are all just focused utterly on the tech, because they’re all hardware guys,” he says. “They don’t get software. They’ve tried to outdo Apple with hardware, but the problem is the customer doesn’t care. The Samsung Galaxy has done pretty well, but it’s just price-driven. It’s not desire-driven. There are no lines out the door to get a Galaxy. They’ve done all this work on branding, but the name doesn’t mean anything to consumers. It& #8217;s like calling a...
