The Boulton Bugle

The lovely folks at Three and Brando have sent me another phone to trial for 2 weeks and this time it’s the wonderfully named HTC ChaCha (HTC Status in the USA) otherwise known as ‘the Facebook phone’ due to its’ main selling point of easy Facebook integration via a dedicated blue Facebook button, pushing this button enables the user to quickly post a status update or upload a photo without having to access the main app and it works pretty well.  The ChaCha is not too heavy a phone, and as with most HTC phones is of good build quality – as you can see from the photo above the phone curves slightly just below the centre of the handset.

The phone itself runs version 2.3 of the Android operating system and packs a 5 megapixel camera with flash and autofocus which takes really decent photos, easily good enough quality for uploading to Facebook or Twitter.  The ChaCha’s screen is quite small for an Android phone which doesn’t always work well but HTC have done an excellent job of designing it with their HTC Sense customisation so nothing appears cluttered at all.  The full QWERTY keyboard is excellent, well spaced and laid out and very responsive.

One feature I especially liked was on the lock screen – there is a ring at the bottom centre of the screen which you pull up to unlock the phone, however it is also possible to have up to four apps on this screen (by default these are Phone, Mail, Camera and Messages) which can be opened by dragging any of them onto the ring and then they open! Very clever and useful!

The ChaCha comes packed with pre-installed apps, some exclusive to HTC and some I’ve not seen on an Android phone before (and I’ve tried a fair few!) – there is an FM radio, a separate dedicated Facebook Chat app,  HTC’s Friend Stream for aggregating your friend’s Facebook and Twitter posts, an excellent app for keeping up with the latest News stories, and lastly two apps I’ve not seen before on an Android phone a Stocks app providing up-to-date stocks and shares info from Yahoo! Finance and an RSS reader which syncs with your Google Reader account.  Also included is HTC’s own (and frankly, in my opinion rather poor) Twitter client called Peep, personally I prefer TweetDeck, and their Weather app which is really rather impressive, I particularly liked the sound effects when it updates! It also includes an attractive Weather widget for the homescreen.

All the usual standard pre-installed apps are also included such as Calculator, Calendar, Camcorder, Clock and Alarm, Gmail, Web browser, Maps, Navigation and Places from Google and lastly, YouTube.

With regards to battery life, I easily managed a full day out of the ChaCha with moderate use but I would imagine if you were a heavy user you’d struggle before the end of the day.

To conclude, I really liked the ChaCha, it’s feature packed with a couple of pre-installed apps I’ve not previously seen on Android, excellent Facebook integration and a decent camera too.  As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews I’m currently considering my options for my phone upgrade next April and impressed though I was with the ChaCha, my number one choice at the moment is still the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (see previous review) mainly due to the bigger screen, the large choice of games optimized for the Play and slide-out gaming controls, sorry HTC!

My grateful thanks again to Three and Brando for loaning me the ChaCha, appreciated as always!