HTC Salsa photo gallery shows off Facebook button, Legend-ary design

The HTC Salsa is nacho run-of-the-mill Android phone -- in fact it's tortilla-y different. (Thanks to reader Marc Crane for that second pun.) Why? Because hidden just under the usual HTC touch-sensitive buttons, there's a dedicated key for accessing Facebook.

We'll get on to that in a minute, but here's the skinny -- the HTC Salsa is an Android 2.4 Gingerbread phone due to hit the UK toward the end of spring. It has an interesting design, with a slightly jutting-out chin, much like the lump you find on the bottom of the HTC Legend. Indeed, in the photos above you can see the Salsa alongside the Legend and compare the two phones for yourself.

We like the design, though the crazy-paving pattern on the back will probably prove divisive -- it either looks quirky and original, or like some mad patchwork enthusiast has taken their knitting needles to your mobile, depending on your point of view.

Pressing that Facebook button plunges you face-first into a gurgling swamp of social interaction. By which we mean it launches HTC's Friend Stream app for Facebook and Twitter. From here you can post updates, photos and so on.

Facebook has also been jammed elsewhere in the Salsa's interface. If you fire up the calendar, for example, you'll see your Facebook events, and the wall for those events, so you can look at who's going before arriving at the inevitable conclusion that you hate all your friends, and you'd have a better evening huddled under a blanket watching old cartoons and scoffing Pot Noodles.

You Facebook buddies will also show up in your contacts list, so you can chat to them. Facebook has worked with HTC on these Facebook mobiles (we were treated to a clip of M-Zuck himself espousing HTC's virtues during the official press conference) so fingers crossed these features work really smoothly.

We'll have a review up as soon as possible, but in the meantime check out our in-depth HTC Salsa preview.