Facebook and HTC join forces with Android phones

HTC today announced a pair of new smartphones with Facebook branding. The cringe-inducingly named ChaCha and Salsa, are the first devices to carry the logo of the world’s biggest social networking. However, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated during the press conference that dozens of branded devices will appear by the end of the year.

Both handsets have a dedicated Facebook button beneath the usual buttons at the bottom of the handset. This will act as a smart shortcut button, which will have a myriad of uses depending on what you’re doing at the time. For example it could upload a photo or video, share a web address, or a location, or post a link to a music track you’re listening to.

The ChaCha, with a Blackberry-like layout, has a Qwerty keyboard for easy text entering – great for those who like to update their status on a minute-by-minute basis. Above this is a 2.6in touchscreen, with a modified version of HTC Sense designed especially for its unusually small size and shape. Otherwise it’s an unremarkable little handset, with a 600MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. It weighs just 120g, and should prove popular with teenage girls.

The Salsa is a more traditional Android handset, in fact it’s almost identical in many ways to the excellent, if aging, HTC Legend.

Both handsets are set for a Q2 release date, and should be aggressively priced given their fairly humdrum specifications.