14 DAY TRIAL // One of the two “Facebook phones” introduced by HTC at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, the HTC ChaCha is about to make its debut in the UK.
After Amazon UK confirmed that the ChaCha will be available next month via its webstore, another UK-based major retailer Carphone Warehouse has listed the handset and is now taking pre-orders.
Although the retailer only vaguely reveals the shipping date of the QWERTY Android smartphone by stating that the HTC ChaCha is expected to be delivered in June, it shows the phone as being available for free with a new two-year £20 per month contract.
Touted by HTC as one of the “real Facebook phones,” the ChaCha was manufactured in collaboration with the company behind the most popular social network service, Facebook.
The device comes with a special Facebook button that pulses when the content displayed on the screen can be posted on the user's Facebook account.
The personalized button is very useful as it reduces the number of actions a user has to take to login to his Facebook account and post updates. Whenever a picture is taken, the button flashes and, if the user wants to post the picture onto his Facebook account, he only needs to push the key.
HTC ChaCha sports a traditional QWERTY keyboard and a rather small 2.6-inch multi-touch display with 262k colors support and 480 x 320 pixels resolution.
Surprisingly, the phone is delivered with Google's Android 2.4 Gingerbread with a customized HTC Sense UI to offer a smooth Facebook experience.
Equipped with a 600 MHz processor, HTC ChaCha packs 512 MB ROM, 512 MB RAM and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).