HTC boxes clever with Flyer, Salsa and ChaCha

HTC, the ‘Apple’ of the Apple-free Mobile World Congress chose to wait until day two to make its big announcements.
HTC (High Tech Computer) is the closest rival manufacturer to Apple in mobile tech and its two big reveals came in the guise of another iPhone challenger and of course an iPad challenger.
Announcing five new Android smart phones HTC also revealed its Flyer tablet. Two of the Android phones come with dedicated Facebook buttons.
To confirm how close HTC is to Facebook and vice versa, Mark Zuckerberg appeared at the HTC news conference via video to confirm that more HTC phones with much deeper integration with Facebook will be shipped this year. Such an ‘appearance’ at the HTC event should do much to quash all those ‘Facebook phone’ rumours. Zuckerberg, it seems, is happy not to go solo on a phone project.
The two HTC Facebook phones are cheerily called the Salsa and the ChaCha and make it easier to use Facebook while on the go, and presumably while dancing about, energetically at your local tapas bar. For example, when users take a photo, listen to a song, or shoot some video with their phone they can push the Facebook button [located at the bottom of the device] to automatically upload the image to their Facebook page.
Both phones run Android 2.3. and will be available in Ireland “in the second quarter of 2011”. No prices were confirmed.

Flyer tablet
The Flyer is HTC’s real opportunity to bite a chunk of the tablet market. Firstly the science bit: It’s a 7-inch Android tablet with a 5 megapixel auto focus camera on the back, and a 1.3 megapixel one on the front. It has 32GB of storage and can connect to 3G networks at up to 5.76Mbps.
It’s a nice piece of kit. However, it won’t run on the latest Android 3.0 OS (Honeycomb) but the older Android 2.4 (Gingerbread).
It supports all web browsing with Flash 10 and HTML 5. HTC Watch (think iMovies for Android) promises to deliver low-cost on-demand HD movies for users and the Flyer launches with the OnLive cloud gaming service. http://www.onlive.com/
There are, of course, many other cool features. The Flyer, on the face of it, looks like the first Android device to really offer a challenge to the all conquering iPad.