Besides unveiling an updated trio of Android-powered smartphones, HTC also unveiled a couple of socially-inclined smartphones as well as a tablet PC during the Mobile World Congress, currently underway in Spain.

 

The company introduced its first social phones, the HTC ChaCha and Salsa, bringing the rumoured Facebook phones to life, at least with their branding and functionality. These smartphones operate on Gingerbread (Android 2.3), Google’s latest smartphone version of its mobile OS, and also employs HTC’s latest iteration of Sense to integrate Facebook throughout the HTC Sense experience.

 

When a user makes a call to a Facebook friend, the dialler screen displays that friend’s latest status and photos and even reminds you if their birthday is around the corner. This also applies if you receive a call from a Facebook friend.

 

 

The HTC ChaCha features a unique tilt design shape to its 2.6" (480 x 320) display and also sports a finger-friendly QWERTY keyboard to speed up messaging and email composition. It also has dual cameras, a rear-facing five megapixel camera with auto-focus and LED flash as well as a VGA front-facing camera for video-calling.

 

 

 

HTC’s Salsa smartphone also boasts a rear-facing 5 megapixel camera and VGA front-facing snapper for video calls. Users will be able to instantly share photos with their friends at the touch of a button. This device also has a bigger, 3.4" (480 x 320) display that is touch-enabled.

 

The HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa smartphones will be available to customers across major European and Asian markets during Q2 2011, as well as to the US later this year. No local release info is available yet.

 

 

 

HTC is aiming to compete not only with the iPhone with its smartphones, but also with the iPad, as it unveiled its Flyer tablet PC. This tablet operates on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and is powered by a 1.5 GHz single-core processor. It boasts a 7" (1024 X 600) touch-screen, a five megapixel rear-facing camera and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera (like HTC's smartphones), 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage.

 

The HTC Flyer also features a redesigned HTC Sense user interface (UI) and the company’s new HTC Scribe Technology, which enables the device to be employed with a capacitive pen for taking notes, drawing, or event writing on a webpage or photo.

 

According to androidandme, the HTC Flyer will be launching Q2 2011with Android 2.3, but it will be upgraded to Honeycomb (Android 3.0) several months later.

 

 

In related news, the Taiwanese manufacturer is also in favour of Nokia and its decision to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS as its primary smartphone operating system. According to Forbes, HTC, which has used Redmond’s smartphone OS for the past nine years, stated (via its chief marketing officer John Wang) that this move “is going to make the ecosystem even better for everybody, including HTC.”

 

A video of the company’s new products follows after the break.