BARCELONA—There is no Facebook Phone, but there are many Facebook phones. HTC announced two phones for AT&T with dedicated Facebook buttons today, along with three new Android smartphones, one of which updates its successful Incredible phone for Verizon Wireless.
"A lot has been made about a single Facebook phone, but this year you can expect to see dozens of phones with much deeper social integration than anything that you've seen so far," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said. "We're very happy with the direction HTC has taken."
The HTC Salsa (without keyboard) and Chacha (with keyboard) are the Facebook-centric phones. Both are Android Gingerbread 2.3.3 smartphones with a dedicated button that lets you access various Facebook features. According to HTC, the button lets you "update your status, upload a photo, share a Website, post what song you are listening to, 'check in' to a location," upload photos or share the music you're listening to on Facebook with a single press. The button lights up when it's ready to be used.
"When you press the button, it instantly tells all of your friends, 'check this out,'" HTC chief marketing officer John Wang said.
When a friend calls, her Facebook status pops up on the screen. There are Facebook-branded home screen widgets. Facebook chat and messaging are integrated into the messaging clients. It's a lot of Facebook. But remember these aren't the only Facebook phones - INQ also just announced phones that the company says are just as tightly connected with Facebook.
"We did not just add social networking to the phone. We created a new HTC Sense experience where social networking permeates throughout the phone," Wang said.
The ChaCha has a 2.6-inch, 320x480 screen and a full QWERTY keyboard; the Salsa has a bigger 3.4-inch, all-touch 320x480 panel. Both phones have VGA front-facing cameras and 5-megapixel rear-facing units, and both are based on relatively low-end 600Mhz Qualcomm MSM7227 processors, so they won't be very expensive.
HTC said that AT&T is "exclusively bringing this unique user experience to market later this year" in the US, though it's a little unclear whether that means these specific phones or customized, AT&T-branded models.
HTC also showed some potential love for T-Mobile. The new HTC Incredible S works on T-Mobile's unusual AWS 3G band, so it's a good bet the phone will come to T-Mobile. One warning, though: HTC says the phone is only coming to "European and Asian" markets, although none of those markets uses AWS.
The Incredible S looks like a follow-up to the successful Droid Incredible for Verizon Wireless. The Incredible S makes one major visual change to the existing Incredible design: the little touch buttons on the bottom of the screen are now virtual, and they rotate when you rotate the phone. That's pretty neat.
"Incredible S combines premium design with premium experience," HTC chief marketing officer John Wang said.
HTC makes a big deal of the Incredible S's contoured back, but we've already seen that on Verizon's Droid Incredible. It just hasn't been on an international phone before.
Like the existing Incredible, this is an Android phone with an 8-megapixel camera and a 1Ghz Qualcomm processor. The processor is a newer model than the Incredible's though, the MSM8255, which should provide better performance. There's also a front-facing camera, and the 800x480 screen has been kicked up to Super LCD.
HTC also announced midrange and lower-end phones, the Desire S and the Wildfire S. Those are less interesting to American consumers because the Desire and Wildfire never really broke through here.
The Desire S is a 3.7-inch Android phone with an aluminum body and a 1.2Ghz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor. It has a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera with "integrated video chat," according to HTC, and a 5-megapixel rear-facing unit with HD video recording capabilities.
"Your user experience is going to be smoother than ever before," HTC chief marketing officer John Wang said.
The Wildfire S is a cute little low-cost Android phone with a smaller 3.2-inch, 320x480 screen. The display is a Super LCD panel rather than standard LCD. It "has all the big features of the Desire S, but in a lovable compact form factor," Wang said. The phone will come in black, silver, and purple.
Will these phones appear in the US? We're not sure.