INQ chairman to sit on Spotify board

Could future INQ handsets come with Spotify integration?

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21 August 2009 15:10 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Spotify has only confirmed officially that it's working on iPhone and Android handsets, but there's a strong possibility that the next generation of INQ handsets will have Spotify integration, given the appointment of INQ CEO Frank Meehan to Spotify's board.

As previously reported on Pocket-lint, Asian investor Li Ka-Shing has taken a share in the company. He happens to be the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, which owns the UK's 3 network and also owns INQ. Frank Meehan will be the representative from the company on the board, according to Forbes.

The most recent INQ handsets launched without the Last.fm integration that the original INQ1 had, purportedly because the INQ team said that phone owners weren't using it. However, this development puts that in a new light.

It's entirely possible that the next set of phones from the company will come with full Spotify integration. The current generation of INQ phones are limited to Java applications, so if that remains the case then we could see a Java Spotify app too, which would bring the functionality to a much wider audience.

There's a lot of extrapolation that's possible from this relatively minor announcement, but it'll be interesting to see what INQ pulls out of the bag over the next year or so.

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