Android phone models have come and gone, and some have been very successful while others have been not. If you have been to countries like India, where the mobile companies have been running around to get into the ‘economical-full of features’ market, you would have phones like the Dual sim Android phones long before Samsung launched one – with so many issues that people have actually thrown them in the dustbin to get a new phone.
How Not to Make an Android Phone: The HTC Chacha
While the HTC ChaCha would not have been that bad a photo, we remember the disgruntled look of many a person in the mall who wanted to see the HTC Android phone and were given the ChaCha to look at. Here are some reasons why we think the ChaCha was not as great a success as the guys at HTC would have thought it would be.
To begin with, the HTC ChaCha had a full blown QWERTY keyboard. Now, we are all for QWERTY keyboards, but the very fact that it existed on an Android phone that has shrieked itself hoarse saying the apps require nothing less than full screen was something that even we couldn’t understand – and we have been using cellphones for only about ten years.
With half the screen gone on the already small phone, we can only wonder how people would be playing Angry Birds, or using Google Maps, or even accessing their Google Mail accounts on it. And God forbid if someone wanted to read a webpage on the device! Of course, we are just couch reviewers who thought about this issue even before we touched it – we wonder why the designers at HTC did not think about this when they were designing the said phone.
The second thing that was an eyesore in the ChaCha was the dedicated Facebook button. Such buttons are nothing less than vanity value today. With people becoming more and more adept at switching their phones and accessing any app that they want, it would be quite an inanity to have a dedicated button to Facebook, or Twitter, or anything. With this, the ChaCha becomes the first time Facebook comes on anything hardware other than merchandise. We are sure Zuckerberg and co are not very happy about that fact. Also, the CPU was less than 1 GHz, which is 2011 was something quite surprising, that too coming from a maker like HTC, one couldn’t believe that they had just 800 MHz of juice in the phone – making it another reason why this phone will soon be available at heavily slashed rates on the online shopping kiosks.
While these were the issues that were visible right when a person saw the phone, the rest of the issues came tumbling after a few weeks after the launch. The battery, which is already quite notoriously small for any Android phone, would conk off in three hours for the ChaCha, thereby adding to its woes. Some complains also erupted about the miscellaneous bugs in the said phone. Granted that HTC understood that they would have to integrate YouTube, Picasa and other famous apps with the phone, they did not look at the various bugs that such a new phone would have – which chomped into the ChaCha’s popularity even before it had a grand opening on a global level.
These are the three main things that make us think that the HTC ChaCha is a study in how not to make an Android phone. We were quite surprised that it’s HTC, known for its form and function in the phones that came up with such a clunker.
Author Bio:
Aditya blogs at AndroidMag.com. You may like to read more on why Nokia gets android 4.0 port and other android phones info at his blog.
