First Two Facebook Phones Announced

Facebook isn't making its own phone, but that's because it doesn't have to; several other companies announced plans to release new models with deep Facebook integration at this week's Mobile World Congress. In one of the new models, for example, your friends' default Facebook photograph will pop up on your screen along with recent status updates whenever they call. With Sense, an HTC product for Android, Facebook messages and chats will be integrated with tet messages and e-mail.

So all those rumors about a Facebook phone turned out to be wrong. There are a ton of Facebook phones in the pipeline! Mark Zuckerberg popped up in a pre-recorded (and extraordinarily creepy) video at HTC's press event at Mobile World Congress yesterday, to announce that his company had worked closely with the Android wizards at HTC to tightly integrate Facebook with Sense (HTC's custom Android skin). The first two devices to market will be the HTC Salsa and HTC ChaCha, decidedly low-end devices running Gingerbread on top of bargain hardware. Both phones pack 512MB of RAM and 600Mhz, single-core processors -- the Atrix 4G these are not. The ChaCha features a 2.6-inch, 480x320 screen above a full QWERTY keyboard, while the Salsa keeps the lowly 480x320 resolution, but ditches the keyboard in favor of a 3.4-inch touch panel. At the bottom of both devices, though, you'll find a context-sensitive Facebook button for quickly sharing what your doing.

Read the full story at Switched.