HTC ChaCha

HTC ChaCha                                    RS 11500

                                                                          BUZZ RATING 7.5/10

Let's get one thing straight: the HTC ChaCha is not the Facebook phone. It's not manufactured by Facebook. But let's get another thing straight, too: the HTC ChaCha is the Facebook experience
And it's even endorsed to a certain extent by the King of the network, Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a sermon about it at the phone's launch

  HTC has taken its already winning Sense interface and remoulded it with a big blue 'F' at the centre - something the notoriously quiet Facebook founder went on record as saying he's "very happy" with and, in a nod to the future, how they "look forward to a lot more to come".

Rocking the latest Android iteration, Gingerbread 2.3.3 and fully capable of a dance-off with some other 3G-capable Android devices, it's due to hit stores any day now, with a sim-free price tag around £250, and a contract offering of around £20 per month.
That's probably too much for the 14-21 age bracket the ChaCha is evidently aimed at, though we'd imagine Pay As You Go offerings might make it a little cheaper too.

 

HTC ChaCha review: Internet


 

This being an Android device, the ChaCha comes with one of the best mobile browsers on a phone. Android's stock offering is brilliant at rendering pages and resizing text and it is testament to that that where Sense is so prevalent over other parts of the OS, when it comes to the internet, HTC does, on the whole, leave it alone. It isn't broken - so it's not fixed.

But, where messaging is where the ChaCha excels, browsing is definitely this dancer's Achilles heel. Coming from an Incredible S, we found the browsing experience to be disappointing.
The real issue here is Flash support. Smaller flash elements appeared OK - advert banners and the like. But when we tried to load up flash video on a number of websites, the ChaCha just gave up.
An swirling loading icon filled us with hope - which was then dashed by a large yellow triangle with an exclamation mark warning us we had no chance of getting any further here.

We already assumed Flash wasn't going to work thanks to the lower-spec Qualcomm processor, but to come so close to seeing the video and having it cruelly taken away is more annoying than being told it's not available at all.
Aside from that, browsing speeds are absolutely fine and we had nothing to complain about. The ChaCha is a 3G device that supports HSDPA, and loading pages happened quickly with the rendering speeds we've come to expect from Android's browser.
Wi-Fi was obviously quicker in the majority of cases, but we found absolutely nothing to complain about over 3G instead and we're big fans of the way text reformats upon tapping. The Android bookmarks system is top-notch and, combined with HTC's bookmarks widget, browsing is made even easier.


That said, the screen size can impede your enjoyment. It feelsa little too small for any real web browsing and, although it's fine for a little bit of light use, you won't find yourself navigating full sites on the ChaCha for too long.

HTC ChaCha review: Camera

The ChaCha comes with two cameras - a fairly nondescript VGA on the front and a much better 5MP job around the back.
It's not a bad camera - but it's not wonderful. We'd put it in the category of "gets the job done." Pictures come out alright and are fine for a quick Facebook post or MMS. This being a Facebook phone, the likelihood is that most photos will simply be sent over social networking anyway and therefore, it doesn't really matter.
The irony is that the pictures look pretty bad when you view them on the ChaCha's screen. Yet when uploaded to a computer, they're much, much better. We actually thought a lot of our photographs were blurred and dull-looking when we viewed them on the phone, but they were sharp as a pin on the computer screen.
The other issue we had is that there is virtually no visibility in direct sunlight. Taking photographs as you lie on a beach in the Mediterranean is something you won't be doing with the ChaCha.
On the plus side, starting the camera from cold is speedy and you're looking through the viewfinder in less than a second, which is a good attribute to have. We've lost count of the amount of times we've missed the moment whilst waiting upwards of three seconds for an iPhone to get going and open the camera lens up.
Once in, you've got four options - switch cameras, switch to camcorder mode, flash on/off and gallery. These are displayed as thumbnails at the side of the screen.
Beyond that, hit the options button and you're presented with a wealth of options including self-timer, various fun effects, image adjustments, ISO levels etc. There really are lots to pick from -possibly too many considering the ChaCha is not a phone for budding Lord Lichfields but hats off to HTC for at least giving us the choice.

The camera has autofocus, but it gave us mixed results. It makes plenty of cute noises like a real camera, but when taking a picture we found that we had to consciously tap to focus the portion of the picture we were after in the majority of cases or we were left with a slight blur.

Shutter speed is not so great. At times, we expected to get an extremely awful picture, but actually got something that worked. At least on the screen. When sent to a computer, the photo looked a lot worse.

The camera performed well in good light, colours were reproduced well and, as mentioned, there are plenty of options to change the levels should you want more.
In dimmer light, the camera was adequate, but the LED flash comes in handy and you can set this to automatic. In pitch-black conditions, it managed to bathe the subjects in enough light to do the job well.
In low light conditions, the pictures looked great with the flash on but pretty awful without. The camera also struggled if we were in a room with a lot of light coming in through the window - picking up the light but making the rest of the room look incredibly dark.

Taken in good light with a window behind us. No problems with colour reproduction.
Click here to see the full-size image

We actually expected this photograph to look awful when sent to the computer because it looked so dim on the screen and quite blurred - yet surprisingly, the orchid came out clear.
Click here to see the full-ize image

Similarly, the iPhone looked very dim and blurred on the ChaCha's screen. Not so when sent to our computer.
Click here to see the full-size image

These two photographs were taken as we moved the camera across the room in a sweeping motion to check the shutter speed. Unsurprisingly, they came out rather blurry.

Close up subjects in direct light fared well on the ChaCha's camera.
Click here to see the full-size image

Macro shots in good sunlight didn't do too well with the autofocus. This image looks more like something you'd expect to see on a 2005 camera phone, not a 2011 model.
Click here to see the full-size image

We took this picture in low light and the LED flash managed to perform brilliantly. However, when we turned the flash off and took the same picture in the low, natural light results were not so pleasant.

 HTC ChaCha review: Video

The video offering on the ChaCha is, like the stills camera, adequate but not ground-breaking. It shoots at a maximum resolution of 720x480 and looks good on the screen. Unfortunately, it only records in the slightly old and outdated .3gp format.
One thing we liked is the fact that when in the video recorder, you're able to fiddle around in the options and adjust your levels just like you can in the normal camera app. You're also able to shoot videos with a number of effects to jazz them up, and we think this is something that the target market will lap up.
Our only criticism is that you have to dig through the menus to do this and for most users, that'll be a chore. Having a shortcut on screen would have made this a lot more intuitive but it's hardly a big deal.
You can choose whether you'd like to save the video with audio (though why you wouldn't is beyond us) and the sound does record well. We had no issues with it being out of sync in any way, and audio was clear.

You have the option of shooting with the LED flash on and can also record from the front-facing video camera, which is ideal if you'd like to record your musings to Facebook (again, watch out for the pulsing blue 'F' button).
The ChaCha did struggle to keep up with the light as we moved from darkness to light and, it sometimes found it hard to work out if we were indoors or outdoors at time, making bizarre jumps from lightness to darkness. The handset also found it hard to move around (which is odd, since that's what video is all about) and pictures looked blurry unless filming a static subject.

  
Battery life
When the Desire HD launched last year, it came with a disastrously small 1230mAh battery pack that many struggled to make last a day. With the ChaCha, HTC has seen fit to kit it out with a 1250mAh battery so it's only marginally bigger. But it's a massive improvement.

Thanks to the Android battery monitor on Gingerbread, you can see where the power is zapped from and it's more often than not the display.
Since the ChaCha has a pretty small screen, it doesn't require too much power to suck on to keep it going. It does, of course, use power to keep your feeds up to date, but we would go so far as to venture that this is some of the best battery life we've seen on a HTC device so far. It also charges remarkably quickly - probably because that battery is smaller.
HTC quotes talk time as being up to 450 minutes on GS, with 400 hours of standby time. Of course, it's never quite possible to match the manufacturer's claims, and it will always depend on how you use your phone.
Gone are the days when we all had only phone calls, text messages and Snake to measure our usage.

We took our review unit off charge at 9pm on a Monday evening. After setting it up and downloading a few apps from the Market, by 9am, it was still on 80%.
Over the next day, we took about 15 photos, a couple of videos, played games for about 30 minutes, sent 36 texts and 24 emails plus dipped in and out of Twitter and Facebook. It didn't completely die until just after 8am on the Wednesday morning which, for a modern smartphone, we think is fairly impressive.
More so when you consider that Android phones don't have the best record when it comes to battery life. If you decide to go away for the weekend and use the ChaCha sparingly, we see no reason why this phone wouldn't give you a full two days' worth of juice.
Connectivity

Aside from the 3G and Bluetooth, we have Wi-Fi and GPS, which are now pretty much standard and essential for a phone of this kind.
We found the Bluetooth worked well with our car stereo, despite the car unit being a model designed for use with an iPod. Once paired, the ChaCha connected straight away each time we got in and streamed the music to the stereo making it a pleasant experience.
An added bonus was that it also automatically synced our phonebook each time, though this may be stereo dependent.

HTC ChaCha review: Benchmarks

How it rates against the rest - higher is better

How we test

TechRadar aims to produce the most helpful phone reviews on the web, so you're able to make a more informed buying decision.
Part of this testing process includes benchmarking. It's a good way of measuring the overall performance of a product's internal hardware components.
We use Antutu System Benchmark to test tablets. It's a comprehensive Android benchmarking app and produces consistent results.
Antutu measures an Android device's CPU performance, 2D and 3D graphics performance, memory speed and internal and external storage read/write speeds. It combines the results for each test and gives the device a final score.
We test each device three times and take an average.

HTC ChaCha review: Contacts and calling

 

Contacts have always been one of HTC Sense's strong points, with a fantastic and unmatched ability to manage your address book well. The ChaCha takes that and builds upon it.

To bring up a contact, you just tap out their name on the keyboard and, as you spell the name, it appears in front of you. You can then access their contact card and see every conceivable option of contacting them (bar carrier pigeon) and each last bit of information on them - from their latest Facebook update to their Twitter status.
You can message them on Whatsapp, and you're also able to view previous messages, emails, Facebook galleries and call history.

HTC really has managed to nail contacts, and they feel just like a natural part of the ChaCha. As with previous HTC models, there's also a sorcerer-like ability to automatically link Twitter, Facebook and Google contacts together, with the option of accepting or declining the change. It's one of the reasons we're big fans of Sense.


This being a Facebook phone, your Facebook contacts are all in there, too, meaning that you don't have to go rooting through the actual app to dig out a contact - you can just call them up on the Contacts app and away you go.
It saves time and effort; you feel that HTC really understand what they're trying to achieve here.

Some of the keys double up as your numbers for dialling (in the same way that they do on a BlackBerry) but there is a really helpful quirk. Say you want to call 'Pete", you dial PETE with the letter keys and Pete's contact comes up.
Say you want to call Daz, you press D (also number 5), A and Z (also number 7). Instead of instantly getting a D when you press the letter, you get a number 5 on the screen, because the ChaCha thinks you're dialling a number. But then when you press the A letter, it changes the 5 to a D. It knows what you're doing instinctively.


To add a number, just start typing it and the ChaCha will helpfully invite you to add it to your contacts.

Call quality is good and we had no complaints.
The ChaCha managed to keep hold of a signal just as well as other phones and callers on the other end of the line said we sounded fine. The quality of the earphone speaker isn't going to win any awards due to a lack of bass but it was by no means bad.
We were able to hold a conversation for a good half-hour without any problems, and part of that was in the front seat of a car on the A1 going towards Hertfordshire from London, where signal bars were going up and down like an elevator.
Bluetooth syncing worked well with our car stereo, too, with no problems to report. The integrated speaker is loud enough to place in the centre of a table and hear the caller at full pelt.
In fact, at times it was so loud, we had to turn it down because some sounds were distorted - but this only happened when the person at the other end admitted to shouting down the line, and so isn't something that HTC can be blamed for.
Bearing in mind that this phone is clearly aimed at younger users, we can't help but feel sorry for bus passengers who may soon be subjected to a high-volume dose of Justin Bieber at the hands of teenagers, once they cotton on to how loud the speaker can be.


 HTC ChaCha review: Interface


The ChaCha runs Android's latest Gingerbread iteration, which is a welcome move. We couldn't hide our disappointment recently when we reviewed the far more advanced Motorola Atrix (also a big social networking device) and discovered that it ships with the older Froyo version.
We wouldn't have been too surprised to see Froyo on the ChaCha, since it's more entry-level, so it's a real credit to HTC that they've decided to make this as up-to-date as possible.

Do you smell a 'but' coming? Good - here it is. The HTC Sensation - the company's newest flagship device - ships with the very latest HTC Sense on it (3.0). So why is the ChaCha (which comes out after the Sensation) running the older version of Sense?
Curiously, the unlock screen of the ChaCha does include a nod toward Sense 3.0 in the form of a ring that you slide to unlock the screen - so one of the main things missing is the 3D spinning interface, which we assume is simply down to a lower amount of grunt under the hood.

Also, another thing that we noticed missing is the Quick Shortcuts tab that HTC introduced in its Gingerbread rollout to the Incredible S. On that device, when you pull down the notifications bar, there are options to quickly toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS etc. It's very handy and, yet, it's been left out of the ChaCha. We don't understand why.

Since the screen is smaller than what we're used to seeing on HTC devices, everything it reformatted. Icons are smaller, and on the homescreen they're at the side of the large clock, rather than below it. Facebook status updates are also present, thanks to a widget.
By the very nature of Android, all of this can be redrawn by the user and you can decide which icons /notifications/clocks etc (if any) you want and where.
Out of the box, the ChaCha gives you four homescreens to play with, which you swipe across with your fingers, though you can easily increase this number to seven. The capacitive touch screen is highly sensitive and we found no issues with lag or slowdown. - impressive for a skinned Android device with a sub-1Ghz processor.

Another feature that we've come to love from Android phones is the sharing options that are present. Unlike the iPhone, where 99% of tasks have to be done from within a specific app (even with the forthcoming iOS5), with the ChaCha, you can export files across apps seamlessly.
So, if you see some text on a webpage, highlight it and tap 'share', and every conceivable method and app you own that allows sharing will let you.
It means that you can transfer just-taken photos to Dropbox, send a song you're listening to to a mail contact or add a soundfile from AudioBoo to a tweet. It's easy to use and makes life incredibly easy.


Interestingly, with most Android phones we've tested, the user has been required to have a Google account to use the phone.
The ChaCha is different, though - when you first turn it on, you just have to log into Facebook and the phone will then start up. You're prompted to enter your Google details (and you'll need them in order to use, for example, the Android Market) but you're not forced to, which is jolly handy if you're never going to use that Google malarkey anyway.
 TC ChaCha review: Maps and apps

HTC ChaCha review: Maps and apps

 Maps

This being an Android phone, the fantastic Google Maps is here and works brilliantly, as it does on most Android devices. Google's free sat-nav system, Navigation, is on here too - though it still says its a beta, despite having been around for what feels like forever.

Whether you're driving or walking, it makes navigation easy and - crucially - free, though we must admit that we did find it slightly frustrating using the screen for sat nav in the car because it's so small. This is more because we've become used to larger touchscreens - it still works as it should and does a sterling job.
Getting a GPS fix the very first time took around 45 seconds but after that, we had no real problems, with a lock tending to be found within 10 seconds.
We also used the ChaCha for a sport session after downloading Adidas's fantastic MiCoach app and it managed to keep us on track. A few times we heard Jonny Wilkinson's voice in our ear warning us that the GPS was low, but it still clung on for dear life and managed to give us what we hope was an accurate reading of our run when we got home.
Apps

Aside from the Facebook Chat widget, there are no brand-new Earth-shattering widgets on the ChaCha that we've not seen before. But that's not to say that what's there isn't good, because it is.

You get the standard Android widgets but also the HTC variants (with the option to download more once you've set up a HTC Sense account). The thing about widgets is that, like apps, there are so many free ones available on the Android Market, you can always find one to do virtually anything you need.
Preloaded apps are standard fare - everything from a calculator and voice recorder to stocks and Google Latitude. But there was one new one we hadn't come across before on an Android device and that's Google Books.

There were three loaded on as standard (Frankenstein, Wonderful Stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Pride and Prejudice) with the option to download more, but you may be limited as to what you can get by legal and copyright issues. The free Amazon Kindle app should sort you out, though, if you run into bother.
One very odd thing about Google Books is the way it's set up. When you open the app, it looks fine onscreen, but as soon as you select a book it opens sideways, which then means you have to turn the phone on its side to read a book in portrait mode.
If this were a large touchscreen, you could understand it but, frankly, you look odd holding the ChaCha the way you have to in order to read a book. There doesn't appear to be an option to change this.

One of the common complaints about Android is that it's difficult to put your apps into relevant folders - something BlackBerry and Apple have both managed to nail.
Most Android phones will just throw everything into the app drawer and you have to dig around, searching by alphabetical order. Samsung do offer a folder facility of sorts on their current flagship model, the Galaxy S2.

Unfortunately, HTC doesn't accommodate this in the ChaCha but it does the next best thing. To the right of the App Menu, you're given three options - all apps, frequent apps or downloaded apps. It's a nice touch and makes navigating your downloads even easier.
Considering you only have seven homescreens on the ChaCha and are therefore limited on space for app shortcuts if you also want to have widgets on display, this makes all the difference.
It's an easy and intuitive system, and anybody familiar with Android will know instantly how to work it, and somebody new to Android will still be able to navigate it easily too.

HTC ChaCha Review

 

Top user Comments

 

 My battery is fine. Memory is shit, which is why you use a micro-SD.

  the screen size is very small for a touch screen

I love this phone apart from the facebook button, so would this phone be OK for a person who doesnt use facebook all that much? please reply!

i ll prefer this over nokia e6

phone sucks

galaxy Y ......i was going to get it buy mehhh got the galaxy ace :D or else try the HTC explorer Brilll phone :D