I have a new HTC Salsa. Black.
It really feels like the successor to the HTC Legend – similar size and handling, with a less pronounced kick up at the end of the body, which, when you are on a call, ever so slightly curves the mic towards your mouth.
The feel of the phone is great, and the addition of a prominent and featured Facebook button (the only hard button on the front of the device) seems like a useful idea.
In practice, I found that I don’t really use the Facebook button. It functions differently depending on the context … if you are looking at a photo and press the F button, it uploads the photo, if you are listening to music and you press F, it posts the track, artist name and album artwork. If the phone is idle, then a quick press of the F button lets you post to your wall. All of these seem great, but for some reason I am just never compelled to use it even though like a lot of people, I spend a lot of time on FB.
Some of the other integration with Facebook is more useful – such as notifying you with suggestions of contacts that are on your phone, and on Facebook – prompting you to link the two contacts together. This works really well, but I’m not sure this is new to the Salsa – I think this was the same on Legend and other HTC’s.
I have come across a fairly annoying limitation with the Salsa/Android. The phone only has 150Mb of internal memory, which is largely taken up – about 2/3 – by factory installed apps from HTC and Google. This only leaves about 50Mb for apps, which might sound like a lot (and would be plenty if any app could be copied off to the SD card), but in practice it fills up very very quickly. Install Google maps updates, Facebook, Foursquare, Angry Birds and Shazam and you’re pretty much out of room.
This is such an annoying miss by the Android creators. Apple have made memory management a thing of the past, whereas for Android its left to the user to manually copy apps back and forth out of internal memory onto SD. A really poorly executed experience, which will limit apps takeup for owners of this phone.
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