Facebook Phones are being introduced to the world at Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona, Spain, we will look at them in greater detail as we get them. Adopting a dance stance, we do wonder whether future iterations of such handsets will not be enhanced with a suffix, but rather, take on other names like the HTC Rock, HTC HipHop or even HTC Classical. I digress, let us see what these social networking phones are able to do.

First off, the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa do stand out from the rest of the smartphones that are on the market simply by virtue of a dedicated Facebook button that delivers one-touch access to the key functions of the Facebook service. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the HTC Sense experience is diminished in any way – no sir, you will find yourself more entrenched in Facebook more than ever now.

After all, with over 500 million active users worldwide, Facebook is a tour de force that will surely be a powerful brand name to be associated with, making sense for HTC to jump at the opportunity.

The Facebook button on the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa are context-aware, where it will gently pulse with light whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook. This means pressing it just once will let you update your status, upload a photo, share a Website, and even post the song that you are currently grooving to. How about snapping a photo of friends on your phone and have it uploaded instantly to Facebook?

The possibilities are more or less endless, and perhaps HTC does not want to put all their eggs in a single basket, hence the splitting up of the Facebook phone to theHTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa variants. The former will come in a unique tilt design which shapes the display and physical QWERTY keyboard, making it a snap to see everything that goes on as well as being easy on your fingers as you type. Features include a 5-megapixel color camera with auto focus and LED flash and a VGA front-facing camera, a 2.6-inch, 480 x 320 resolution landscape touch screen.

As for the HTC Salsa that reminds us of the HTC Legend, it is more of what you’re used to if you aren’t a BlackBerry addict, sporting a generous 3.4-inch, 480 x 320 resolution touch display.

Expect both handsets to hit Europe and Asian markets in Q2 this year, while they will arrive Stateside via AT&T in an exclusive agreement.

According to broadband comparison site Broadband Expert we are set to see record numbers of sales this year for pay as you go mobile broadband dongles which will easily outstrip contract mobile broadband over the festive period.

The comparison site says that pay as you go mobile broadband is now as or more popular than contract mobile broadband but will be even more so over the Christmas period when pay as you go products traditionally perform well. In addition to the Christmas move to pay as you mobile products there are other reasons for the move to PAYG and away from contract in the mobile broadband market according to Broadband Expert. One reason is cited as data usage, many consumers are unaware of who much data they need making pay as you go a safer option since they can top up and only pay for the data they need. A second reason is the increased unwillingness of consumers to commit to lengthy 12 or 18 month contracts with many people approaching both finance and long term contract details with a different mindset in the last few years as the economy and personal finances have struggled. The third reason is the decline in the so called ‘free laptop’ sales which provide a laptop with an 18 or 24 month mobile broadband contract. These offers where incredibly popular and helped boost the number of mobile broadband contracts however the networks found them to be problematic due to high levels of fraud and the upfront cost of the laptop leading to some providers dropping these all together whilst others reduced the number of these deals they offer.

If you are looking a mobile broadband dongle this Christmas Broadband Expert offer a hand comparison of pay as you go dongle deals in the UK.

The internet as we know it has been in existence since the early 1980 and whilst it gained popularity during the nineties its only really took off when broadband technology superseded the existing dial up connection via standard telephone lines. This existing system was painfully slow and made downloading any thing other than small files massively time consuming.

This old technology also meant that the phone line was busy if the user was surfing online so consumers were forced into purchasing a second line. Modern broadband connections can carry vastly more data and massively faster speeds which has lead to an explosion in the volume of downloaded movies, music and other larger files.

With this speed of data transfer many new products are finding a route to market via a broadband connection like movies on demand, online shopping and real time music channels. Because its basically free on most broadband packages to have as much data as you want other business have also sprung up offering VoIP ( voice over internet protocol ) which allows the user to make calls free calling from pc to mobile or land line phones any where in the world.

As the internet improves and speeds up the technology will allow for more and more data and voip will eventually move to an image based calling system were the two ( or more ) callers anywhere in the world will be able see each others faces as if they were chatting in the same room.

A lot has happened since dial up , at that time it took 10-14 seconds to load a page of text and a five minute song would take about 13 minutes compared to 5 or so seconds on an current average 8mb broadband line today. There is no real limit to where broadband speed will go to and 100mb fibre optic lines are already in existence.