INQ1Watch: Reasons behind the phone – 1,2,3

In wrapping up the coverage from the launch event, we thought we‘d bring you some of the thinking and reasoning passed along to us as to why the development of the phone’s series by Hutchinson began. These were outlaid to us on the day by 3’s CEO Kevin Russell and the INQ’s CEO Frank Meehan.

These facts came along to us in the form of stats around the rise of data services over the 3 network, charted as an example from Nov 2007 until last month.

To be honest, we were a tad surprised over the figures knowing their frontend portal presented to their customers. Also we recalled some distant knowledge of 3 services being heavily firewalled to a severe degree, where not a great deal of access to outside websites was allowed.

So when we saw the number of users mentioned which started at 250,000 from last year and hitting the high of 950,000 of late, it took us back a bit. After digesting all and sundry plus getting hold of a three SIM card, all of these are actually supported and all works rather well too. It looks like their portal doesn’t scream and shout about it too much.

Just to back up their slide and doubly endorsing how 3 is used in today’s world of social networking, they went on to throw some more numbers at us.

On 3 handsets just over the October period, 2 million searches were performed, 3.5million emails were received by users on the network, 20 million minutes of Skype calls were made, 36 million chats were made on Skype, 200 million instant messages took place, 44 million pages on Facebook were viewed where there were only half that number six months ago. And a partridge in a pear tree.

Whilst you’re digesting all of that, it makes sense that a phone like the INQ should have come along right now. Even more so when you take into account news has reached us this week that mobile Facebook users have tripled this year, to the mighty sum of 15 million and counting.