HTC ChaCha has Facebook button, takes events and chat to the dancefloor

Spare a thought for the famous Android robot: lacking hips, it'll never be able to dance the cha-cha-cha. But it can get close -- with the sultry, hip-swinging HTC ChaCha, swinging around the floor this week at Barcelona phone fiesta MWC.

The ChaCha is an HTC smart phone with a Qwerty keyboard and 2.6-inch, 320x480-pixel screen. It packs the latest version of Google's Android software, 2.4 Gingerbread, running on a fairly creaky old 600MHz processor with a wobbly 512MB of RAM.

Niftily, though, the ChaCha features a little button that lets you tell the world who you're dancing with: a Facebook button. The key, emblazoned with a Facebook logo, lets you instantly update your status or post to Twitter, without having to open an app. You can also ChaCha-check in from the dancefloor with Facebook Places.

Facebook events and messages appear in the phone's built-in apps too. Events are displayed in the phone's calendar with your events and appointments. They even show the event's wall, and the list of who's going, so you can choose who you want to dance with before you've even donned your ill-advisedly tight satin trousers.

Facebook messages show up in the phone's unified inbox, alongside your emails and texts. The ChaCha also checks your address book to see who's online in Facebook Chat. Or should that be ChaCha Chat?

The HTC ChaCha cha-cha-chas its way on to the smart phone dancefloor this summer, alongside Android-powered dance partner the HTC Salsa. We've tried out the new phones already, so click here for our hands-on previews of the ChaCha and the Salsa, as well as HTC's other new phones, the Incredible S, Wildfire S and Desire S.