Chinese Release Of The HTC ChaCha Will Not Have Facebook

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We’ve been following the so-called “Facebook phone”, also known as the HTC ChaCha (or the HTC Status in what is truly one of the great puns of our time), for some time now and there’s a bit of news that’s going to be something of a surprise. When the HTC ChaCha arrives on Chinese shelves, it will offer one button access not to Facebook, but to Chinese messaging service QQ instead.

Yes, like something out of an old Yakov Smirnov routine (In Communist China, Facebook Phone…doesn’t…have Facebook.), the ChaCha will drop one-button access to Facebook when it emerges. Apparently, in China, the Great Firewall blocks Facebook access, but in its place, a variety of Chinese social networks have cropped up, and QQ is the largest of same. Interestingly, this is reportedly the only change, as most everything else will be left quite the same from one version of the ChaCha to another.

By way of recap, the HTC ChaCha boasts a 2.6 inch HVGA display, backed up by a full QWERTY keyboard, an 800 MHz processor, a five megapixel rear camera, the HTC Sense 3.0 interface and Android 2.3 (or Gingerbread, if you like the tasty version) for an operating system. It’s set to retail at $419 when it hits in the United States, though Chinese pricing is, as yet, unclear.

It really isn’t that surprising that a large local competitor of Facebook’s would get preferential billing over the other service, especially considering that Facebook is blocked across China (why ship a phone into a place where the key feature has been bricked before it even gets out of the box?), but still, a Facebook phone without Facebook is strange enough for most anybody. And considering that QQ, at last report, boasts fully 700 million users (Facebook itself, at last report, was only about a hundred million over that itself), it’s not like a whole lot of functionality was lost here.

So what do you guys think? Simple case of favoring the local program? Or a basic failure of human decency? No matter how you feel about this surprisingly politically-charged issue, we welcome your opinion on it in the comments section below.