HTC ChaCha review

The ChaCha’s camera is also good enough for Facebook images. It has a five-megapixel sensor and an LED flash, along with auto-focus and face recognition. In shots with bright backgrounds, we found that the ChaCha had problems with metering, making the foreground too dark. You can touch anywhere on the screen to force it to focus on that point, but it won’t balance the lighting to match. Shots are noisy and colours a bit muted, but they’re good enough for the web.

An LED flash makes night-time shots possible, but image quality is distinctly Facebook

There are some problems. Some apps can’t work with the screen’s landscape orientation, so you have to turn the phone sideways to use them. The 800MHz processor isn’t terribly fast, and we noticed some lag when running multiple apps, but overall performance was good. The phone only has 91MB free for apps, though, so you’ll need to buy a microSD card and use Apps2SD if you want to install a large selection. Battery life is also mediocre and as with most smartphones, you’ll need to charge the phone every night.

The ChaCha is a cute but powerful phone, and a hardware QWERTY keyboard is always useful. The Facebook integration is well-implemented, too. If you’re a Facebook fan this fun and well-designed phone is a good buy, but serious web browsers would be better off with the larger screen of Motorola’s Defy (see What’s New, Shopper 277), which still holds our Budget Buy crown.