subject: HTC Salsa Is A New Technology Smartphone [print this page] HTC Salsa Is A New Technology Smartphone HTC Salsa Is A New Technology Smartphone
The last few years have seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of the online social network Facebook. With the total number of users quickly approaching 1 billion it is not hard to envision a time when virtually all of the planet are connected through the network. Recognising the popularity of the service, many phone manufacturers have for some time now included Facebook support as a key feature of their handsets. With so many people updating their statuses or writing on walls from their phones, Facebook support or integration has become a standard feature on most smartphones.
While most Facebook apps are limited to quicker access to the website, instead of having to load a web browser from the phone, phone manufacturers like HTC are quickly seeing the need for more Facebook integration. The HTC Salsa, and its sibling the Chacha, are two of the first wave of what are being referred to as Facebook Phones. While these still offer the same excellent messaging and entertainment features of other smartphones, they come with far great Facebook integration than normal.
What marks the Salsa and the Chacha out in this respect is their dedicated Facebook buttons. Many phones feature a dedicated camera button, providing you with fast access to the phone's camera, but this is the first instance of such a button for Facebook. This can be used merely to open the Facebook app, but can be used in a number of additional ways as well. For example, after taking a photo on either the Salsa or the Chacha, you can press the Facebook button to quickly upload it to your profile.
Both phones also provide faster access to notifications and events from the popular social network, displaying this information on the phone's homepage. While both phones come with excellent Facebook support they are differentiated by their physical designs. The HTC Salsa comes with a full touchscreen design while the Chacha instead opts for a QWERTY messaging style. The full frontal design of the Salsa makes it excellent for all forms of multimedia, while the Chacha provides an excellent means of typing with a BlackBerry style keyboard.
Both phones provide 512MB of internal storage with an additional 32GB available through microSD. High speed 3G and Wi-Fi connections are available, as well as Bluetooth with A2DP for wireless headphones. Alongside the excellent social networking support, each phone comes with threaded SMS, MMS, email and instant messaging clients like Google Talk. The Salsa and Chacha are also two of the few phones that come with full support for Facebook Chat, so you can keep up to date with your Facebook friends in real time.
Both phones come with excellent web features, including YouTube support for streaming videos. Picasa integration is also on offer, so you can upload photos to this service as well as Facebook. Each phone comes with a 5 megapixel camera with such features as autofocus, face detection, geo-tagging and an LED flash.
Most smartphones today come with Facebook support in one form or another, but the Salsa and Chacha are two of the first phones to come with extended Facebook support as their raison d'tre. Like other smartphones in this category, the Salsa and Chacha come with excellent messaging and entertainment features as well, with much to offer besides their excellent Facebook support.
