Just don’t call it the F-phone
A new low cost cellphone that puts Facebook and other social applications at its center will debut next week on Hutchinson-owned 3 in the UK and Australia, according to Unstrung. The new handset has been designed by another Hutchinson subsidiary, INQ Mobile, and is the first of a number of “low cost social mobile” offerings in the pipeline.
Apart from a dedicated Facebook client the device will also include applications for Skype, email and IM.
INQ Mobile’s CEO, Frank Meehan, told Unstrung that the company’s goal is to build cheaper 3G phones — two to three times less that the average smartphone — in order to persuade more consumers to start using mobile data.
“For 85 percent of our customers, we can’t really sell more than voice and text,” he says. “You need to drive data usage higher right across all the handset segments. You want the majority of customers, not the top-end of the community that rules strategy at the moment.”
Meehan says that with regards to Facebook integration, INQ worked closely with the social networking company in order to offer better integration than is available on existing handsets. Unlike the iPhone, for example, INQ’s Facebook application runs in the background so that users can automatically receive updates from their Facebook friends. “So Facebook becomes like SMS and can be used in the same way as SMS,” says Meehan.
Interestingly, before heading up INQ, Meehan was involved in the development of the first dedicated Skype mobile phone, also sold through 3, which we enthusiastically reported on just over a year ago.
Netflix is promoting trials of its ‘Watch Instantly’ streaming video service with select Xbox 360 games, reports 
Last week Engadget 
It may have taken four years but they got there in the end. Netflix and TiVo today announced that the two companies have began rolling out access to Netflix’s ‘Watch Now’ video streaming service on Internet connected TiVos.
Six months 
Similar to Apple’s own ‘Remote’ app for iTunes, 
Netflix has finally began rolling out a version of its video streaming service for Mac users, and it comes courtesy of Microsoft. Although only available initially to “a small percentage of new Netflix subscribers”, with a full roll-out anticipated by the end of the year, the new PC-based version of the company’s ‘Watch Now’ service is powered by Microsoft’s Flash competitor Silverlight, a technology that crucially includes its own cross-platform ‘studio approved’ DRM solution, thus enabling Netflix to support both Windows-based PCs and now those running MacOS (Intel only).
No longer content with dissing his company’s own offering, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is now calling the whole product category a “hobby”. But that isn’t stopping others from forging ahead to bring Internet TV into the living room, with both TiVo and Netflix rolling out partnerships this week to give their customers more content and hardware choices respectively. But first back to what Jobs said during the company’s Q4 earnings call on Tuesday.