HTC’s ChaCha is a Vodafone-exclusive Android 2.3 smartphone that manages the trick of looking distinctly different from the pack, thanks to the inclusion of a full keyboard on the phone itself. The comparison with numerous BlackBerry models is inevitable and in use the keyboard isn’t quite as good as a BlackBerry one, but it’s quite responsive. Less responsive is the 2.6in 480 x 320-pixel display, which is squished to accommodate the keyboard. HTC has done some customisation here, including a sliding lock screen that can open context-sensitive applications with the drag of a finger, but the overall effect on many Android applications is to squash them in unusual ways.
It’s almost the reverse of the problem we’ve seen on a number of 10.1in Android tablets — because the screen size isn’t what might be expected by the application, odd things happen. The ChaCha is also one of two HTC phones to feature a prominent F key at the bottom of the phone, which hooks directly into Facebook from whatever you’re doing; so for example, if you’re taking a photo it can directly upload it. For Facebook junkies this could be great. However, as you can’t reassign the button, if you don’t care about Facebook it’s just another button in the way.
The ChaCha isn’t a high-cost phone and as such, you don’t get a high-speed processor or lots of storage, with 512MB and an 800MHz processor. In our testing it mostly worked well enough, but it had a few laggy spikes in specific applications, most notably gaming titles.
