How do you sell the Facebook phone in a Facebook-free environment? Luckily for HTC, China isn’t short on homegrown social networks, one of the largest being the instant messaging service QQ. So as the HTC Status (once known as the ChaCha) migrates toward China, where our favorite social network has been banned, Facebook will be left behind to make room for a dedicated QQ button (pictured at left).
Now, the phone will still be called the ChaCha, reports MicGadget, and apart from the default social services getting switched around, it won’t be any different from our AT&T version. To refresh your memory, the Status/ChaCha sports a 2.6-inch HVGA display with a full QWERTY keyboard down below, BlackBerry-style. It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on an 800MHz processor, with a 5-megapixel rear camera and HTC Sense 3.0 UI slapped on top.
Its real stand-out feature would be the dedicated Facebook button down on the bottom right corner of the phone. It lets you get instant access to the social network, and pulses when you’re on a sharable page, video, etc. When pressed, whatever web page you were viewing or song you were listening to gets automatically posted to your Facebook wall. Obviously, the button will work a bit differently with QQ and its over 700 million users, but the same idea still applies.
HTC hasn’t been super clear about availability on the Chinese ChaCha, but we do know it’ll go for 2,680 yuan, which is $419 over here in the States.