Vodafone is expected to launch the HTC ChaCha and Salsa Android phones next month, after HTC sent out an invitation to journalists for a media launch event on 30 June.
Read our detailed previews of the HTC ChaCha and the HTC Salsa, and check out our guide to the best upcoming smartphones in 2011.
Officially unveiled at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this year, the HTC ChaCha and Salsa smartphones were introduced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Both phones feature a dedicated Facebook button that works contextually and lights up whenever the user can share multimedia content or status updates through the popular social networking service.
HTC sent an invitation to journalists today detailing a media event that will be jointly hosted by HTC and Vodafone on Thursday 30 June. Both the ChaCha and the Salsa are low-end Android phones, which means they may possibly be launched as pre-paid devices, or at the very least on low cost, post-paid monthly plans. It is not clear whether the Vodafone deal will be an exclusive one.
Both the HTC ChaCha and the Salsa feature heavy Facebook integration in the core functions of the phone. The Facebook button can be pressed to automatically upload an image taken with the camera, and will automatically check in through the Facebook Places feature. Users can also view Facebook statuses and photos on the dialler when making and receiving calls, and both phones include a dedicated Facebook chat widget that is built into HTC's Sense user interface.
The HTC ChaCha has a full QWERTY keyboard along with a 2.6in capacitive touch screen, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, a front-facing VGA camera for video calls, and a microSD card slot for extra storage. The HTC Salsa has a larger sized 3.4in capacitive touch screen, and the same 5-megapixel camera, but has a touchscreen keyboard rather than a physical one. Both phones are powered by a moderate 600MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and run the latest 2.3 "Gingerbread" version of Google's Android software.