What makes HTC Salsa a facebook phone?

HTC Salsa, aka Facebook phone, is in India and is retailing for Rs. 20500. HTC Salsa has a 3.4 inch capacitive touch screen, runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, has 5 megapixel rear camera, a VGA front camera, 800 MHz processor, 512 MB RAM and Bluetooth.

In addition to all the specifications above, HTC Salsa comes with one more thing. A dedicated hardware button for instant facebook access. The facebook widget, as HTC calls it,  will let you select friends and family members whose updates really matter to you and when you press the button, the updates are there in just one click.

Here’s what you can and can’t do with the Facebook phone :

• Clicking on the facebook button you can instantly share a picture or a video to your facebook profile.
• When you are listening to a song, and if you hit the facebook button, it will automatically share the song name as a wall post. This only works with the default Android music player.
• Long press on the facebook button will get you to Facebook places.
• Only one facebook account can be used.
• There is no support for facebook group page or page support.

The dedicated button will only let you do stuff with Facebook and if you want to use twitter, a separate app should be used. Facebook users are in general Twitter users too. Given the real estate of the phone screen, twitter integration would be a better choice because facebook posts are not limited and occupy the most valuable space. This might lead to missing some valuable information on the onslaught of frequent updates.

Facebook integration is a nice touch to the crowded Android phone market. The real question is do you really need it? A question to HTC : Are you integrating the wrong tools?

Calling HTC Salsa a facebook phone would be like calling the next iPhone a Twitter phone. Of course, Apple would never let it happen as it loves its ‘i’s’ very much.