HTC “Facebook Phone” Dumps Facebook For Chinese Market
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.
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.