The new Wildfire from HTC is pitched as a new entry level smartphone, however if you put the screen to one side, the handset is actually better equipped than many so called top end phones, making it a really good proposition to anybody looking for a new handset or an upgrade.
The Wildfire uses the excellent Android 2.1 operating system backed up by a fairly nippy 528Mhz Qualcomm MSM 7225 processor chip. HTC have added their own skin to the OS in the shape of their excellent Sense user interface. This is the same system that proved so popular in the Legend and Desire handsets, so its inclusion is no great surprise. One of the mains draws of Sense is the excellent leap feature. What this does is effectively offer you an overview of all your various homes screens all on a single display, leaving you the simple task of selecting the one you require. This does save time scrolling through numerous pages to find the one you desire. Other useful features of the user interface are the superb Friendstream feature. This collaborates a whole host of information from your various social networking acounts and displays it to you all in one place. Once again, this ultimately saves you time logging into various sites to achieve the same results. On the theme of social networking, the HTC Caller ID lets you know your friends latest status updates when you receive a call from them, which when you think about it could prove a very useful feature.
The screen on the HTC Wildfire measures 3.2" and is capable of displaying a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. Images actually look better than the resolution may suggest, thanks to the device having an impressive colour pallette of 16 million. An advantage to the relatively low resolution display is that it does not prove to much of a drain on the battery, meaning the Wildfire performs particularly well in this department. The 1300mAh lithium ion battery provides 690 hours of standby time with 3G coverage, or converted into talktime this equates to over 8 hours, clearly beating many rival handsets. The Wildfire performs well as a media player, despite lacking the excellent iPod feature of Apples phones, the music player is still easy enough to operate and looks good. A 3.5mm headphone socket gives you a huge choice of headphones to use with the phone. A 5 million pixel camera takes a good quality of photograph, backed up with the ability to capture video as well.
The HTC Wildfire seems great value for what it actually offers. If you overlook the screen and processor, everything else about this handset is an absolute winner.
The HTC Wildfire and the Nokia N8 Orange are available now.
