INQ Cloud Touch review

The Facebook phone, the Spotify phone - all for under £200

The definitive INQ Cloud Touch review
The definitive INQ Cloud Touch review

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INQ Cloud Touch review: Battery life and connectivity

The INQ Cloud Touch battery life is something of an odd issue - it varies wildly depending on which services you have running.

We managed to extract a day and a half's use out of the INQ Cloud Touch with none of the push email or Wi-Fi turned on, although that included a little bit of GPS usage from time to time as we navigated rural Aberdeen.

INQ cloud touch review

The battery life is a little erratic when it gets low - we constantly had a long time in the green, but as soon as it started to dip into the yellow we found we only two or three hours' more use before it died. It's a definite improvement on the first model we reviewed, but we'd be surprised if you regularly got more than a day's use out of the phone if you use a number of its core funtions.

We like the fact battery life meter on the info key shows you how many hours of talk time and music playback are left, although it's worth noting that these are really more of a guideline than anything else - for instance, the music lifetime left will only hold up if nothing else is turned on.

Connections

The usual list of Android-based connections is on offer here - we're talking 7.2Mbps HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP.

The latter worked very well with our Jabra Halo headphones, picking up and holding wireless music playback with aplomb, and very quickly too.

INQ cloud touch review

GPS was fast to connect as well, which is handy for a phone like the INQ Cloud Touch where geotagging photos is something you're going to be more inclined to do as sharing them is more prevalent among Facebook users.

PC connectivity

There was no PC suite in the box for our INQ Cloud Touch, but we decided to go down the tried and tested INQ route for media management and use DoubleTwist instead.

Once downloaded, it worked first time, recognising the phone as soon as possible and asking to download all music and pictures from it, which it did in the blink of an eye.

INQ cloud touch review

It's a great way to manage media on to your device, providing a clean, iTunes-like interface to work with - but for things like contacts or messaging backing up, you're plum out of luck here.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.