HTC ChaCha

With the proliferation of touchscreen phones we've seen recently, it's all too easy to forget how pleasing a proper QWERTY keyboard can be.

This point is proven incredibly effectively by the HTC ChaCha: its buttons are gloriously responsive and well-spaced, making typing a truly enjoyable experience.

The ChaCha's typing prowess is a definite bonus, since the phone constitutes one half of HTC's 'Facebook Phone' assault – the other device being the keyboard-less Salsa.

The distinctive blue Facebook key is located at the bottom-right of the handset – always close at hand and ready to post details of your current activity (be it surfing the web, watching a YouTube video, or even listening to a song) directly to your Facebook stream.

Given the large amount of typing one typically does when logged into Facebook, that QWERTY set-up makes excellent sense. Bashing out a witty comment or cunning observation takes seconds, and this will endear the handset to dedicated social butterflies.

The Facebook Chat application will only solidify your love for all those lovely tactile buttons. Chatting in real time requires quick input, and a QWERTY arrangement is a must.

In producing a device which excels at text input and offers such a great physical interface, HTC was compelled to make a few structural compromises.

The most obvious is the screen, which is a 2.6-inch landscape variant. The massive amount of space taken up by the keyboard has forced this choice, and to be honest it never really sits well. Although the Android OS can play relatively nicely with a non-portrait display, some applications and games refuse to.

For example, when playing the frighteningly addictive Doodle Jump you'll have to turn the phone on its side, which isn't as awkward as it sounds, but is still less than ideal. Other apps get roundly confused by the screen's orientation, and constantly switch between the portrait and landscape view.

The ChaCha's other unusual design element is the kink in its middle. A deliberate attempt to render the device more ergonomic and thereby make prolonged typing more comfortable, it succeeds in its objective, but lends the phone a rather strange appearance.

Like the soon-to-be-reviewed Salsa, the ChaCha packs a 800MHz CPU (boosted from 600MHz late in the handset's development). Sadly, it's still short of the 1GHz chips we've seen in other mid-range smartphones, and this means that Flash support isn't available in the web browser. Thankfully, it does little to dent the performance of HTC's excellent Sense UI.

As a gaming device, the ChaCha is something of a disappointment. That bizarre screen is to blame - it's too small for finger-based titles and the need to hold the phone sideways to play many titles is an issue.

But one could easily argue that gaming wasn't the first thing on the minds of the ChaCha's designers. With its extensive Facebook integration and that lovely keyboard, this is clearly a device aimed squarely at text-happy users.