AT&T hideous Facebook Phone to dubbed the Status
The idea of a “Facebook phone” isn’t a new one — it started circling around as half-joke, half-rumor over a year ago. Then it actually showed up in real life, as a button added to an otherwise normal HTC Sense phone called the Salsa, which has been largely ignored since its debut. Now it seems that the socialized horror has made a return, and it’s far more heinous than most would ever fathom.
The HTC ChaCha, which only weeks ago was released in Europe, is now making its way across the pond to AT&T stores as the Status. Unlike its predecessor, the Status isn’t just a Sense phone with an extra button. This abomination has a Facebook button, a physical keyboard, and a tiny 480 x 320 resolution screen. Basically, it’s a blatant attempt to market something to the hordes of Facebooking BlackBerry users — and let’s be honest, a large portion of them will be tempted to buy it.
The Facebook button on the phone’s “chin” isn’t just to signify the sorry state of ubiquitous branding in this day and age of internet-saturation. It acts as a quick-key to bring the user straight to Facebook functions with the drop of a… finger. Apparently a Facebook app, two widgets, and OS-wide social sharing features just aren’t enough already.
Then there’s the keyboard — you might have noticed it takes up roughly half the phone.
Physical keyboards aren’t exactly the devil, but they are a bit of a throwback in a world quickly making its way through capacitive screens and already flirting with completely touchless interfaces. Slide-out keyboards make sense, since some people like doing important things with their smartphones in between games of Cut the Rope, like editing HTML or remotely logging into a server. This isn’t like that, though, since the keyboard comes at the monumental sacrifice of screen size, and in this case, the screen is just plain dinky.
480 x 320 isn’t exactly the whole truth when talking about available screen real estate on the Status, either. Take the image on the right as a good example of just how useless this phone is when dealing with something like Facebook Places (discounting the trivial usefulness of Facebook Places itself). The “map” is a sliver in the middle of the screen. The rest is taken up by text boxes that line both the top and bottom of the update area, and the bright blue touch-screen companion to the multitudes of physical keys takes up the entire right side.That blue button is present in nearly every single Facebook-related situation, for what basically amounts to no good reason at all. What you’re left with after title bars, text boxes, and buttons is a space so small that nothing really fits anymore. This is supposed to be efficient? That’s right, the idea behind this phone is that Facebook users can “knock out” their seriously time-sensitive Facebook tasks faster than they would with a real phone. At least, that’s what HTC says on its product page.
One last bit of travesty should be noted here: The Status has Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Granted, it’s Sense, but it’s still Gingerbread. That has to irk all the people who paid for real Android phones that are still stuck with Froyo.
When it comes down to it, the world just doesn’t need a Facebook phone to begin with. The point of smartphones and apps is to allow people to do whatever they want and still have their choice of devices, but this is somewhat of an insult to a population of users who are already treated a bit too much like cattle as it is. Facebook is already doing far too good a job of dumbing down the internet, and undoing years of hard-earned progress. We don’t need that effect to spread into the smartphone market as well.
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