HTC ChaCha is an Android-powered phone featuring a full QWERTY keyboard and deep Facebook integration, including a dedicated Facebook button.

With a candy-bar form factor, the phone primarily features a 2.6-inch screen and a four-row QWERTY keyboard. Dedicated “call” and “end” buttons make a comeback on this phone too, something we haven’t seen in a while. On the left of the phone is a volume rocker and a USB post, while the right features, nothing! No really, the right side of the phone is all smooth; space that could and should have been used for a dedicated camera button. The top features the power button and the 3.5mm headphone port.

Coming back to the screen, it features a landscape orientation with a resolution of 480×320. If you’ve been using a full-touch screen phone prior to this, you will definitely notice the lack of screen real estate. As a result, you’ll find yourself scrolling a lot more. Of course this isn’t a flaw of the device, and rather the feature, or the design.

By design it has reduced the size of the screen to fit the keyboard. They keys are shaped like pebbles and don’t take long to get used to. That being said, I did find myself looking at the keyboard and typing rather than looking at the screen. If I didn’t, mistakes were made and lives were lost. OK so the former is a lot truer than the latter. The keyboard is great, but it is not the best.

The HTC ChaCha features a modest specification sheet; it isn’t trying to be a powerhorse of the a phone. That being said, everything seems to work smoothly on ChaCha without any hiccups. Even high-quality YouTube videos worked perfectly.

The camera on this is a 5-megapixel shooter on the rear with a 0.5-megapixel or VGA on the front. Not going to turn any heads, the camera quite simply gets the job done. You won’t find it replacing your actual camera but it serves pretty well for a quick snap.

The ChaCha is powered by Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) featuring its add-on layer of HTC Sense. It’s actually an excellent and necessary add on as it re-formats the layout for the smaller screen size, making the phone much more usable than it would have without it.

Probably the most important defining feature of the ChaCha is the Facebook integration. Featuring custom applications for just about all of Facebook’s features, including Chat, the ChaCha does deliver what it promises.

A quick press of the Facebook key brings up the application to send in a status update or post a picture. A longer press of the button brings up venues and lets you check in. The dedicated Facebook Chat application works extremely well too.

Those whose social lives overlap with the social network will find few devices better than this. The great keyboard, touch screen and latest Android-powered make the ChaCha a great device. At its price, HTC ChaCha is an excellent phone with near-perfect Facebook integration that will be its central selling point.

HTC ChaCha Specs:

The Wildfire S is powered by a 600MHz processor, 512MB RAM and 512MB ROM. Built with simplicity in mind, the phone has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, a 5 Megapixel camera with video recording, Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi. It comes with HTC Sense and Swype keyboard for easy text input.

HTC’s next effort in the Android tablet space, the Puccini, is set to go on sale in the UK from June 27th, it has been revealed.

Leaked last month on 911HTC, the hitherto unseen tablet is to follow in the footsteps of its slightly older brother, the HTC Flyer. Although unlike the Flyer, which runs on Android 2.3, aka Gingerbread, the Puccini will be powered by version 3.1 of the slate-optimised Android Honeycomb.

Full technical details are still pretty thin on the ground but we are almost certain that the Puccini will rock a 1GHz dual core processor and a larger, 10.1-inch screen than the Flyer – effectively making it HTC’s answer to the iPad 2.

Pricing details and launch partners have yet to be revealed. However, some retailers are reportedly planning on selling it for £600 for the 32GB 3G model, which would make it slightly more expensive than the closest iPad 2 equivalent.

HTC Flyer owners need not feel let down, though, as HTC is said to be hard at work to rollout an update to Android 3.2 imminently, which is specifically tailored for tablets with seven-inch panels.

Design
The EVO 3D’s façade is strikingly similar to the original HTC EVO 4G with a 4.3-inch screen and four haptic feedback controls along the bottom consisting of Home, Menu, Back, and Search. However, it receives a screen upgrade, flaunting a 960×540-pixel SLCD display with 16 million colors. The screen quality was just as bright and refined as the Sensation 4G’s, so watching movies and playing advanced games were beloved activities during our tests. The front of the phone also houses a 1.3-megapixel camera for skyping and self portraits. It wasn’t the most comfortable phone against our ears, due to its sharp edge above the calling speaker, but the phone’s overall size was quite portable.

Aesthetically, the HTC EVO 3D is inimitable with its grooved back panel, dual 5-megapixel camera lenses, and oversized camera shutter button with neighboring 2D/3D switch. There was also a dual LED flash configuration between the lenses, and the camera panel mimicked Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. While we loved the giant camera shutter button, being the camera nerds that we are, it was a bit of a hindrance, interfering with a standard grip on the phone. Also, we miss the red interior that was present on the EVO 4G, and are only limited to a scarlet border surrounding the dual lenses.

Under the rather flimsy back panel, the EVO 3D offered an 8GB MicroSD card and 1730mAh battery pack. The phone also had 4GB of internal storage for a total of 12GB out of the box, but we feel that a 3D entertainment Super Phone should have been packed with more. Also, how did that larger capacity battery perform compared to a standard 1500mAh juice box? We’ll have to wait a few sections, but in the meantime let’s finish up here with ports and buttons. The EVO 3D has a 3.5mm audio jack, Power/Lock button, and MHL terminal in addition to the camera controls. MHL means the phone supports USB and HDMI, but it also means you’ll need a special HDMI connecter to do so. How about the kickstand? Not this year, and we really could have used one.

Phone Calling and Internet Connections
When it comes to basic phone functions, the EVO 3D fails. I struggled with reception and Internet connectivity issues all through my test period. Calls sounded muddy and garbled, with some syllables swallowed by the phone. The earpiece and speakerphone were both of adequate volume, but voices were muddy on both sides of the connection. The phone had no problem connecting to my Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars), and starting voice dialing, but that voice dialing was inaccurate.

I had a very frustrating time trying to connect to the Internet on the EVO 3D. I rarely rate phones down for signal and 3G speed problems, because the networks play a big role. But the EVO 3D’s problems were so bad that I have to make an exception. I tested the EVO 3D against an HTC EVO 4G in Manhattan and Queens, New York, and at one point also against an EVO View 4G tablet.

Using Sensorly’s field test app, I found that about 80 percent of the time, the EVO 3D reported weaker 3G signal (measured in -dBm) than the EVO 4G. In 14 tests with the Ookla Speedtest.net app, I got speeds below 400Kbps down on five of them, plus two tests that failed entirely. That’s a poor 3G experience. Of course, these results were inconsistent: one of my tests hit 978Kbps. But enough tests went wrong to cause a serious problem. And held next to the HTC EVO View 4G tablet, the EVO 3D generally got slower 3G Speedtest.net speeds.

Speeds on Sprint’s 4G network were terrific: I saw speeds of 3-5Mbps in Manhattan and a scorching 8Mbps in Queens. But the EVO 3D had terrible trouble automatically climbing back up to 4G after dropping to 3G. On one test in Jackson Heights, Queens, it climbed back up after 2 minutes of detecting 4G signal. That’s acceptable. But on my next two tests in Long Island City and Manhattan, it hadn’t climbed up after 10 minutes each. Instead, it displayed a “4G!” icon in the title bar and stayed on the 3G network. Pulling down the title bar and manually scanning for 4G only worked sometimes. Great 4G speeds don’t matter if you can’t actually connect to the network.

This translated into a really frustrating Internet experience during my week using the phone. Even with plenty of bars showing, sometimes I’d be stuck tapping my toes waiting for pages to load, or grumbling as I watched them stall out entirely.

Battery life is an interesting poser here. The EVO 3D gets eight hours of talk time, which is great. But heavy 3D or 4G use will kill the 1730 mAh battery; if I left 4G on, or took a lot of 3D videos, the phone could be dead after about 12 hours of use.

When I could stay connected, I enjoyed the phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot mode, which hooks both Mac and PC laptops up to the Internet without a problem. The hotspot supports eight devices.

Android and Apps
The EVO 3D’s Internet problems are a pity, because there’s some delicious hardware here. You get a Qualcomm dual-core, 1.2GHz MSM8660 Snapdragon processor with the latest version of HTC Sense over Android 2.3.3. That makes it Sprint’s only dual-core phone until the Nvidia-powered Motorola Photon 4G shows up later this summer.

The phone’s user interface is in 2D, not 3D. That’s fine, as the screen is most readable in 2D mode, and it helps make the EVO 3D compatible with the 150,000 Android Market apps.

The new HTC Sense is delightful, starting at the lock screen; you can drag your most-used apps into an on-screen ring to jump straight to a task without stopping at the home screen first. The manufacturer adds great-looking favorite people, calendar and social-networking widgets; you can remove them, of course, but you probably won’t want to. You can also track a lost phone through HTCSense.com.

Benchmark results were very good. The EVO 3D benchmarked in the middle of the pack for a dual-core phone, but the important thing is that Sprint hasn’t had any other dual-core phones yet. This phone is far faster than the HTC Evo and Evo Shift 4G, for example.

I got excellent performance from all the basic apps. The GPS locked in quickly and accurately. Web browsing and e-mail both worked well (when I could get connected), and the phone comes with Microsoft Office and PDF readers.

The 3D
The EVO 3D uses parallax-barrier 3D technology, which we first saw in Sharp’s Actius RD3D laptop back in 2003. Parallax barrier 3D screens don’t require glasses, but they have extremely narrow viewing angles: The phone needs to be held in a very specific spot to see the 3D, and only one person can watch at a time. Just like with the Nintendo 3DS.

This is the most awesome gimmick ever. The 3D on here swings between breathtaking and stomach-churning. When it works, it’s like living in a crazy science-fiction world. But I had trouble getting some of the videos I recorded to converge, which resulted in an unpleasant ghosting effect from time to time.

This is also “fishbowl” rather than “popping-out” 3D. The 3D images have depth within a plane; they don’t seem to jump out of the screen.

Most of the 3D content you watch will probably be stuff you recorded yourself. The EVO 3D can watch 3D videos on YouTube, but right now there isn’t much there, just a few movie trailers and technology demos. The phone comes with a 3D game, Spider-Man, where the 3D neither really adds to or subtracts from the game. It’s subtle, and it works. It also, supposedly, comes with a 3D version of the movie “The Green Hornet,” but I couldn’t get it to play; Sprint said that problem will be fixed on retail devices.

I totally failed to rip 3D videos in H.264 format from 3D Blu-Ray discs using the DVDFab PC program; Sprint said those files were missing a necessary header flag. On the other hand, 3D videos recorded with the T-Mobile G-Slate ($399, 3.5 stars) worked perfectly.

The G-Slate videos actually looked better than videos shot with this camera, because the G-Slate’s “eyes” are a little farther apart. The EVO 3D’s own videos seemed a little bit more headache-inducing, requiring more concentration to keep the images from doubling.

3D shooting takes a lot of battery power; I found that as my battery ran down, the phone eventually told me I could only take 2D pictures after a certain point. It also takes a lot of storage space—A 720p, 3D video (the only kind the camera records) ate up 25MB in just 30 seconds. I pretty quickly swapped out the included 8GB memory card for a 32GB SanDisk card. (There’s also 4GB of on-board storage.)

The 3D images and video you take aren’t totally useless on non-3D devices. There’s free software out there which lets you view or print them from 2D PCs.

Just like a 3D image swimming in and out of focus, I’m of two minds about the 3D here. Make no mistake: it is crazy awesome. Everywhere I went, it attracted crowds. And pulling up photos of my daughter in 3D on the screen brings a smile to my face. If you’re looking to start conversations even without dialing your phone, this is definitely the device to get.

But the EVO 3D’s 3D is also oh, so impractical. Its viewing angle isn’t an angle; it’s a point. Move your hand just a little bit, and you ha

Call Quality/Battery Life
The EVO 3D is the type of phone that really requires a strong Sprint network connection in order to attain maximum call quality. We did not have the best experience making calls with the EVO 3D, but if you’re in a strong Sprint zone, you’ll be fine.

We’re concerned about the phone’s battery life, however. With a full charge, our HTC EVO 3D review unit lasted under 5 hours before it reached the dreaded 15% life remaining status. We shot a lot of 3D pictures and videos, watched a half hour of the Green Hornet, and played Spiderman 3D for a while, so that must have contributed to the drain on the 1730mAh battery pack. However, it was the phone’s display that whittled down the battery’s stamina. We made sure to choose Automatic brightness, and switch on every single power saving option available, but the phone drained like a ditch. Our hopes were high with the larger battery pack, but the EVO 3D punked out early regardless.

Price and Release Date
The HTC EVO 3D will be available from Sprint on June 24, selling for $200 with a new two-year contract.

“Our apologies, but there was a typo in the spec sheet for EVO 3D. The correct feature should read: capture video up to 720p and playback up to 1080p on both 2D and 3D.”

Hopefully Sprint and HTC will release an update to correct this issue as it does seem the EVO 3D would be capable of recording in 1080p. Many of us were looking forward to this feature. Will this effect your decision on purchasing the EVO 3D?

Physical Design, Phone and Internet performance
Simply put, the HTC Sensation is a class act. It’s a big phone at 5 by 2.6 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 5.2 ounces, as large as Verizon’s famously bulky Motorola Droid X2 ($149, 3.5 stars). Yet the Sensation feels a bit smaller because of its rounded edges and lack of bumps. It’s made of high-quality metal, glass, and plastic, and feels very solid in your hand.

The Sensation has a 4.3-inch, 960-by-540 Super LCD, which bests its major competitor, the T-Mobile G2x ($199, 4 stars), both in resolution and pixel density. (The G2x packs 233 pixels per inch, while the Sensation achieves 256.) The screen doesn’t have the awesomely deep blacks of, say, the Super AMOLED Plus display on the Samsung Galaxy S II ($799, 4 stars), but it’s a perfectly fine LCD, and text is especially readable given its large size and high density.

There’s nothing extraordinary about the Sensation as a voice phone. It got merely average reception results in my tests. The sound is a little harsh at top volume, and there was a bit of wobble and scratchiness in transmissions. Voice quality is good enough to pass, though, and clearly HTC’s attention is elsewhere with this phone. The Sensation paired fine with our Aliph Jawbone Era ($129, 4.5 stars) for phone, music, and video sound, but it won’t let you operate voice dialing from a Bluetooth headset. That’s disappointing. Battery life, at six hours of talk time, was good, but not terrific.
The Sensation supports T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling scheme, which works just as well as making phone calls over the cellular network as long as you have a solid wireless signal. During testing, I was able to connect clear calls at Starbucks. As you walk away from the signal, though, calls quickly break up and then drop.

T-Mobile advertises this as a “4G” phone, but it isn’t, even by T-Mobile’s standards. This is an HSPA 14.4 phone. That’s fast, to be sure, but not the HSPA+ 42 that’s T-Mobile’s fastest network, or even the HSPA+ 21 used by the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G and Galaxy S 4G.

That said, you’re going to get great Internet speeds on this phone with good T-Mobile signal. In New York City, where T-Mobile has an HSPA+ 42 network, I got download speeds ranging from 4.3Mbps to 6.5Mbps and uploads in the 800kbps-1Mbps range, which pushes the expected 7.2Mbps real-world limit of an HSPA 14.4 device. The phone works both as a tethered modem and as a Wi-Fi hotspot, with the right plan.

Internet

Aside from being beautiful, the Sensation 4G’s Internet browser was not all that advanced. Sure, we could pinch and zoom a page down to view it in a scroll bar filled with icons that represented other windows we had open—kind of like the Leap of the Internet persuasion. We also had a rapid double-tap-to-zoom capability and lightning quick Flash play. However, the browser only had an address bar and Refresh button while we were used to the Bookmarks button in its place. That’s okay, because the phone’s overall speed really made it fly above the rest.

Multimedia and Productivity

With its shiny new interface, HTC decided to show its widgets off. We’ll start with the Watch widget, which took us to HTC’s new Blockbuster-like movie streaming store that offered the ability to buy and download movies straight to the phone. Then we had the People widget, which displayed our favorite contacts for quick access. Add on the in-depth Calendar and Email widgets, and the Sensation modeled the Flyer without question. Oh, and the Gallery widget was super cool, but you’ll just have to wait until the camera section. With its stellar qHD screen and lighting quick processing guts, it was no question that the Sensation 4G handled gaming with ease. Nova came preloaded, but it was only a demo, which was sad because T-Mobile is usually on top of their free preloaded content. One other gripe we had was the Sensation 4G’s keyboard. We expected it to be like the Nexus S keyboard with character menus and a more intuitive layout, but it was just as plain as any other Android keyboard. Prettiness and graphics are the centerpieces on this table.

Call Quality/Battery Life

T-Mobile phones tend to be a crapshoot when it comes to call quality, but our HTC Sensation review unit managed talk time quite well. We didn’t experience any major sound flaws, but certain calls exhibited a blanketed sound, almost as if the other party was talking behind a napkin. Regardless, our calling experience with the Sensation 4G was one of the better shows we’ve seen.

The phone’s 1520mAh battery pack managed to offer an impressive standby endurance, especially after a few charge cycles. The Sensation still could not match the Nexus S 4G, Motorola Atrix 4G, or Samsung Infuse 4G when it came to overall longevity, but the phone held its own, ranking just behind them. We also got an advanced Task Manager and Power Saver options that limited Wi-Fi, background data, Bluetooth, and screen brightness settings.

Camera

Yes, we’re beginning to see 1080p become the standard for more powerful phones, and the HTC Sensation 4G’s 8-megapixel camera gave us Full HD recording. This phone goes head-to-head with the T-Mobile G2x by LG, but in all honesty, the G2x won by a landslide. That’s not to say that the Sensation 4G’s 1080p video quality was terrible, but it was mediocre. The same went for the phone’s still images, which exhibited a fair amount of pixel smearing and noise (check out photo and video samples). So, unfortunately, if you’re looking for the best camera phone, the Sensation 4G is not so sensational.

The good news is that the Sensation had one of the best camera interfaces on the market, giving us a robust Filters menu and decent spread of manual controls. The phone also offered Touch Auto Focus that could be deployed while recording videos, in addition to toggling the video light. Also, the phone’s Gallery widget was sleek, flaunting checker transitions and an interactive icon spread with the ability to add filters after the fact. We could also view pictures in a slideshow format with transitions on the phone, though the lack of an HDMI terminal limited our connectivity to DLNA.

We can expect the processor to be clocked at over 1 GHz given the latest HTC Android devices. No word yet on HSPA+ along with that rumored LTE radio. But, we’re pretty confident that all AT&T 4G devices with LTE will launch with both enabled.

The launch date that Amazon lists is June 26, which is a bit over a month away from now. It’s worth noting that the launch date is about a week later than earlier reports had pegged. The ChaCha has a QWERTY keyboard on the font and has smaller screen measuring in at 2.6-inchs. The screen resolution is 480 x 320 and is capacitive touch sensitive. It runs Android 2.3 and has a 600MHz processor. The rear camera is a 5MP unit and the front is VGA resolution.

The Salsa is all touchscreen with a 3.4-inch screen. The resolution of the screen is 480 x 320 and it is a capacitive touch unit. The smartphone runs Gingerbread and has a 5MP rear camera. It will be for HSDPA networks and has WiFi. Amazon lists the price of the ChaCha at £249.99 and the price of the Salsa is £319.99. These will make appealing entries for the new smartphone user and I bet they will be much cheaper than those prices with subsidies from carriers.

If any of this is correct, it looks to be a huge day for Android, and Verizon. With a slew of top tier high powered phones to start the summer off right. I’ll give you a small rundown just to be nice. The LG Revolution is a 4.3? powerhouse from LG that will be a 4G LTE phone, then the Droid X2 everyone knows. It is the Droid X with a dual-core Tegra 2 cpu for all your power needs. Then they are even launching the Win Phone 7 HTC Trophy the same day, but that doesn’t concern us android fans all that much now does it.

That looks to be one crazy day for Verizon, but we welcome them all. Earlier we say this roadmap for release dates, but things change fast so you never know. Like we mentioned above, according to sources the Xperia Play will also be getting launched in May, but wisely that will be going off May 26th after the rest calms down, as it has quite a few people excited by itself I think. With these dates coming up soon it makes me wonder if this is accurate, but we’ll take what we can get.

The Gingerbread-running device will feature the HTC Sense UI, a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, a 5MP rear-facing camera and another 1.3MP front-facing one, and, of course, the HTC Scribe technology plus an included stylus, for drawing and handwriting purposes.

It looks like HTC has decided to lower the prices in the US, since in Europe the tablet is going to be a little more expensive. It remains to be seen how well this 7-inch device will sell and how it will compare to the other available tablets out there. But if you’re looking for a viable Android tablet, you may want to start saving up your cash for this one.