HTC Shows Off Upcoming Sina Weibo Phone, for Microblogging Addicts

HTC and Sina have today announced the fruit of their first major project together: a brand-new China-only HTC phone with baked-in Sina Weibo integration. This puts China’s biggest microblogging service into the heart of the HTC Sense user interface, so that Weibo is incorporated into the FriendStream app (see below) as well as accessible by a hardware button.

The HTC Weibo phone looks to be a reworked HTC Legend, with its unibody aluminium chassis, that has had its optical trackpad replaced by the Sina Weibo fast-access hard button.

Unique to the phone is a sort of Weibo Home app (see above; left screenshot), which melds Sina news, your Weibo badges and Sina’s location-based service.

In addition, you can chat with the people that you follow on the microblogging service, and they’ll also get integrated into your contacts on the phone similar to how HTC Sense also syncs up with Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s not clear, however, if HTC will remove those latter two social networks – which are both blocked by the Great Firewall here – to be replaced by the more useful Weibo.

Being based on the Legend, which was launched way back in March 2010, the specs are not too hot – a 320×480 resolution on its 3.2-inch screen is disappointing, and it can almost certainly only run Android 2.2, which is not the latest version.

The new HTC Sina Weibo phone shows off its aluminium curves, familiar from last year's Legend handset.

Like many of HTC’s phones sold via official outlets in China, the HTC Weibo phone will come with the HTC App Store, not Google’s Market.

This is turning into a bumper year for China-made or oriented smartphones, with rumors of a Baidu mobile OS being followed by more concrete news of upcoming phones from e-commerce giant Alibaba as well as the software development start-up Xiaomi.

If this dedicated button concept sounds familiar, it should. HTC has implemented the same idea before, but with a Facebook button. Seeing as how Sina Weibo might be the closest thing that China has to a near-ubiquitous social network, the Weibo button wins out.

[Source: Sina Tech news – article in Chinese]