HTC Salsa
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Who knew that such a tiny little button could cause such a stir?

The HTC Salsa is a reasonably unassuming handset at first glance. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to its distant relation the HTC Legend, the phone's front is dominated by its 3.4-inch capacitive touchscreen, but it's effectively being sold on the diminutive blue button located near the bottom of the handset.

Stabbing this Facebook key – which glows ominously at regular intervals, reminding you of its presence – allows you to effortlessly share information with your legion of friends.

It's all about the context. Hitting the button when surfing a web page generates a link which can be posted to your Facebook wall. Likewise, a press when perusing your personal photos prepares the image you're currently viewing for upload.

Share and share alike

Sharing goes even deeper than that. With a long-press you can broadcast your current location to your Facebook friends.

And so the Facebook phone revolution begins. HTC is pushing the Salsa – alongside its sister phone, the QWERTY-packing HTC ChaCha – as social mobiles, with tight connectivity with Mark Zuckerberg's insanely popular networking site.

The truth is, that blue button doesn't give you access to anything that isn't already baked-in to Android's OS. All Android phones with a Facebook app installed can quickly post content to your account in seconds.

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However, the key difference here is accessibility. That glowing key is always within easy reach, never more than a thumb-press away. The Salsa also comes with a handy Facebook Chat application, which allows you to converse with your contacts quickly and easily.

Elsewhere, the phone offers a competent Android experience. It's running Gingerbread, with HTC's likeable Sense user interface sitting neatly on top.

Although it's the latest edition of Sense – complete with revised lock screen and expanded settings options in the notifications bar – some elements that were introduced with the HTC Sensation have been omitted, the most notable being the Watch service, which allows you to view HD movies on your phone.

This probably has something to do with Salsa's processor. Clocked at 800MHz, it's slightly behind the curve in terms of power. Most mid-range Android devices are rocking 1GHz CPUs these days, so the lack of grunt is a little disappointing. It also curtails the phone's chances of supporting Adobe Flash in its browser.

Smooth as you like

Still, the humble nature of the processor isn't immediately noticeable when you're using the device. Scrolling between home screens is smooth, and it's only when you attempt to play some of the more demanding 3D games that you'll bare witness to some slight stuttering.

With a 5-megapixel camera (with SD video recording), 512MB of RAM, and the usual Micro SD storage option, the Salsa is very much a middle-of-the-road Android challenger. Its technical specifications are unlikely to make your heart race, but like so many of HTC's phones it's more about the overall experience than the hardware powering it.

The Sense UI is as intuitive as ever, and the design of the phone is an appealing combination of plastic and brushed metal (although, despite its close likeness to the Legend, it should be noted that it's not a unibody construction).

Much of the Salsa's success rests on how well the phone-buying public warm to that Facebook button, and while it's not as revolutionary as HTC would have you believe, we do feel it will find a receptive audience – especially amongst those mobile users who rely on their handsets to keep them connected with their rapidly-expanding Facebook universe.

HTC Salsa

The HTC Salsa eschews a dual-core processor and massive screen to offer a handset that operates as well as it looks. The Facebook button isn't as ground-breaking as the hype suggests, but it will prove very useful for heavy users of the popular social network
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Damien  McFerran
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.