HTC Wildfire

J. Yeow

at 2:19 pm

The HTC Wildfire is a firm 4 star phone. The reasoning behind this being that the HTC desire is widely viewed as a 5 star phone, and the Wildfire being it’s smaller cousin does pretty much everything the desire can do but has a slower processor, slightly less memory and an inferior screen.

The reason you are considering the Wildfire is because it is smaller but supports everything the Desire does. The 5mp camera, Sense UI, Wifi, 3G, GRPS are all here. And even more the Wildfire fits in the hand better than the lengthy Desire. The screen is supposedly inferior, but I found the LCD to be slightly easier to see in direct sunlight than the Desire which is more reflective. The “poorer” viewing angles of an LCD screen are apparent here, but less colour distortion that other phones I’ve used.

When it comes to attention to detail, the HTC Wildfire has all the bases covered. The way you switch to silent mode, the way the phone unlocks, the intuitiveness of the interface. It’s clear to see that every part of the software has been clearly thought out. Generally navigating the interface is a smooth experience, but there are times, where there is a slight pause or delay as the phone attempts to fetch data to move to the next screen. To be honest the Desire has these moments too, but generally, if you compare this and the Desire side by side, the Wildfire appears a little sluggish. On it’s own, the sluggishness is unnoticeable and only when viewing some videos is it clear the processor struggles. Hopefully the 2.2 update coming to the Wildfire at the end of this year should improve things. Some users claim the Android 2.2 update speeds up the phone by up to 3x.

I’ve had this phone for a few days now and the only downside here is the low resolution of the screen when viewing web pages (it is perfect everywhere else). Text when fully zoomed out is not sharp like the Desire and appears blurry, so whereas you can read most text when fully zoomed out on a Desire or Nexus One phone, the Wildfire requires you to zoom into a page to read it’s contents. Luckily HTC have some brilliant software that renders zoomed in text nice and crisply and will autofit it to the screen. Good Save for what could have made web browsing very fustrating. Otherwise web browsing works identically to the Desire with multitouch and pinch zooming.

In conclusion the made reason to opt for this phone over the desire is the price point. This is the budget phone for the new Android user that does everything it’s older brother does functionality wise. If you have Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and a Google Account, this phone will become the hub of your media activities. Exchange support is a nice add too.
Rating: 4 / 5