HTC ChaCha in China drops Facebook for QQ

For those unfamiliar with the HTC ChaCha, it is an Android handset that is reminiscent of the Blackberry’s design, featuring a QWERTY keyboard and more importantly – Facebook integration. It is the first HTC handset that has been touted as a “Facebook phone” which seems to be targeted at those who can’t get themselves off the social networking website.

Now if you’re living in China and you’ve been meaning to get your hands on the device hoping to get on Facebook, you may be out of luck. Facebook along with Google (and several other websites) have been blocked by China, and it doesn’t look like things are going to change with the HTC ChaCha either. Instead of Facebook, it appears that the China version of the HTC ChaCha will be integrated with QQ instead, which is the country’s most popular instant messaging platform with about 700 million users.

As you can see in the photo above, even the Facebook button has been removed and replaced with QQ’s logo. Other than that change, the phone remains pretty much the same as the Facebook version, sporting an 800MHz processor, a 2.6” HVGA touch screen display, a QWERTY keyboard and Android’s Gingerbread 2.3.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Android, China, Facebook, Gingerbread (Android), htc chacha, instant messaging, social networks