HTC Wildfire - Brown (Unlocked) Smartphone

"5 MegaPixel camera with LED flash and autofocus"
I'm not a photographer or an expert but I've taken a few photos with the HTC Wildfire's snapper and its pretty good at taking pictures. The software is easy to use and its quite fast as well.

"Android 2.1 with HTC Sense"
The combination of Google's brilliant operating system and HTC's excellent skinning software has catapulted handsets like the Wildfire, the Hero, the Legend and the Desire into the iPhone league and arguably way beyond the Apple offering. Slick looking HTC widgets and apps such as a choice of twelve beautifully crafted live clocks to put on the home screen as you see fit, info sharing widgets such as the stocks, news, animated weather, web bookmarks, email, SMS messaging, twitter and facebook offerings to mention just a few.

"Android Market app store"
Universally slammed for not having as many apps as the iPhone offering it's still the fastest growing app store outside Apple - here's a few essential apps that I can't do without;

3 cubed music player - (available free from the market) taking the "cover flow" concept to a whole new level - listen to and navigate your music collection via a rotating 3D album art cube. Also has the ability to find missing album art via the web and check the concert schedule of the artistes in your music folder.

Amazon Kindle app - (available free) The famous e-book reader is now available on Android and it works brilliantly.

Amazon MP3 - (available free) Works exactly like the iTunes music store on the iPhone, I've bought many an album this way.

DoubleTwist - (available free for Mac, PC and Android) Basically does what iTunes does for the iPhone, provides seamless media synching options between your phone and computer.

Spotify - (free to download, need subscription to work) The ever popular music database, access thousands of tracks for a flat subscription rate LEGALLY! You can even download music for off line listening.

Google search by voice - (free to download) Does exactly what it says on the tin, with the added bonus of working quite well. You can even ask for directions to landmarks or maps and will even bring up contacts in you phone book.

Google Maps with street view and navigation - (free to download) Simply awesome, enough said!

I bought this after struggling to find a local reseller who had any available to demo. I'm on O2 PAYG so I was looking for an unlocked model as they're normally on the other networks and O2 typically only offer the higher-end HTC Desire or the ultra-budget HTC Smart.

This falls neatly between the Desire and the Smart for price, but doesn't let you down in terms of features. The model I bought was running Android 2.1, but a quick software update to 2.2 the other day went smoothly. I've already downloaded a stack of decent apps from the easy-to-use Android Market, plus a few others from third party Android app stores.

If you're looking for something to match the feature set of an iPhone, but at a much more reasonable price point then this is the phone for you. Even second hand iPhone 3GS models are more expensive than this phone new, and with second hand Wildfires ranging in price from 120 to 180 quid, there's plenty to choose from. The ability to use my 10 year old PAYG SIM was another bonus (the iPhone's micro-SIM slot wouldn't have worked for me either) and the standard Micro-SD slot for storage is great as I just plugged in the 2Gb card from my old Nokia XPressMusic.

If, like me, you're not afraid to dig into the depths of manually setting up your APNs for 3G (or with my old SIM, EDGE 2G) and can configure all your wifi access points it's a breeze to get running. If your'e a plug-n-go type of person you'd probably be best looking at one on your own network (rather than an unlocked model) so that everything's pre-configured for you.

The Android navigation took a little while (a couple of hours) to pick up thoroughly, learning the contextual nature of the Menu button etc, but once you have it becomes fairly intuitive. Not quite iOs dumbed-down-ness, but not at all difficult once it clicks.

I've not used a vanilla Android install, so I can't compare the HTC Sense interface to that, but Sense does make, er, sense overall.

Battery life could be better, but if you turn off the mobile data network in the background (in Settings>Wireless and Networks>Mobile Network) and your WiFi when not in use you'll see standby times triple.

Charging using the provided mains plug>USB lead is very fast, however charging over USB from a mains-connected laptop (even from a full-powered USB port) took a good 6 hours. Not good if you're in a hurry, but your mileage may vary depending on your laptop and the output of its power supply and a useful feature to have all the same.

Signal strength and call quality have been excellent - much better than all the iPhones I've seen used by friends and colleagues (it seems to be their number one complaint).

Overall, I'd give the Wildfire 9/10. Not perfect, but far from cheap-feeling. Great hardware for a reasonable price tag with all the features you could ask of a modern smartphone thanks to Android, but without the lock-in to a single vendor app store.

If you want a smartphone and you can't justify the silly prices, particularly if you're on PAYG and don't want huge data contracts, then the Wildfire is definitely the way to go.

The HTC Wildfire is best described as a diet-HTC Desire. Meant for those on a budget, the Wildfire has the same looks as the Desire, and the same user interface in the form of HTC’s Sense software. The only real differences are the size, screen and processor – and the price tag, of course. Has HTC managed to create a low-cost smartphone that can compete with the big boys? Read on to see how HTC's latest addition to the Sense family fares.

What we like

The HTC Wildfire is light, compact and fits nicely in the hand - all without feeling flimsy or insubstantial at all. A delicate balance, but HTC has managed it. We're not suggesting that you throw it at a brick wall or anything, but we wouldn't be too worried for its health if we accidentally dropped it.


All the things we love about HTC Sense are present and correct on the HTC Wildfire; leap mode gives you a quick and easy overview of your seven customisable homescreens and allows you to quickly jump between them - a feature we love. Ditto the scrollable backgrounds and the ability to add widgets and shortcuts at just the tap of a button.

As on the HTC Desire and Legend, we're really impressed with the Sense keyboard, even on the Wildfire's smaller screen. Writing texts, Facebook updates, tweets and emails is effortless as basic contractions (I'm, I've, I'll etc) are automatically inputted without you having to dig around in any sub menus for that damned apostrophe. It's also easy to add your own colloquialisms directly to the dictionary.

HTC has traditionally struggled with its handsets' cameras but its 2010 line-up has seen a marked improvement. The 5-megapixel camera on the Wildfire comes with some nifty photo effect options; not only can you easily adjust settings like brightness, contrast and sharpness using touchscreen dials, but you also benefit from filter effects like negative, polarise and sepia effects. We were particularly impressed with HTC Wildfire's touch to focus feature, which is easy to use and very effective.

Signing in to your Google Account and getting set up is effortless. HTC has really put some thought into this and made it as easy as possible, with a wonderful set-up guide getting your Gmail, social networks, Wi-Fi and contacts all set up in one go. We were all ready to go and had started downloading apps from the Android Market within a couple of minutes of having turned the HTC Wildfire on.

The HTC Wildfire comes with an App Sharing tool that allows you to send your friends links to cool apps you've found on the Market. You can send app links to friends via SMS, email or post them to Facebook or Twitter.

Music sounds pretty good on the HTC Wildfire. The default Android music player does the job but isn't mind blowing; there's some nice album art displays and everything but it's pretty basic - there's no equalizers and playlist creation isn't terribly intuitive. Thankfully you supplement this with apps like DoubleTwist from the Android Market to give you greater control.

The 3.5mm headphones which come with the HTC Wildfire are also pretty decent. They're not as leaky as most bundled headsets are but despite this we still relish the option to use our own existing headphones using the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Call quality on the HTC Wildfire is good. There's no noticeable distortion or muffling of sound. In another neat feature, the HTC Wildfire comes with a discreet ringtone silencing system. If you don’t fancy taking a call, simply turn it over to silence

Really nice looking andriod phone. Has all the features you could ever think of and more. Found the optical sensor for flipping through menus a really good alternative to using the touchscreen. Phone feels well made, reasonably quick to respond and the interface i found to be much better than the one on the iPhone! Downside is that some people could find the phone confusing as it has so many features. The thing that confused me the first few times I used it was that when you are texting it auto corrects what you type, so you might end up with a text that makes no sense as it takes a while for the phone to "learn" your common words. The auto correct function is really good once you get used to it. The other feature I found a little irritating at first is that if you add you email, facebook, twitter etc accounts, the phone adds all these to you "people" (address book) so you end up with the same people a few times. When you come to send a text it gives you the option to send it to someones email, facebook etc. This is really useful, but it did take a bit of getting used to as I now have the same contact a few time (phone number, facebook, email) as the phone doesnt link them as one contact. Battery life is good if you dont have lots of apps running in the background and leave all the wireless connections off. If you don't your battery might struggle to last the day!!

Summary

Good points
-Great value for the features
-Andriod apps are numerous and mostly free!
-Good camera
-Easy to customise
-Good battery if you turn off most of the apps and wireless
-Fast for the price, keeps up with phones twice its price if there is not to many apps running in the background.

Bad points
-Can be confusing (not a phone to give your gran!)
-Battery doesnt last long if you have lots of apps running in the background with the wireless on.
-Can get a little sluggish if you have lots of apps running in the background

This phone is a compact version of the HTC Desire, similarly is like comparing a mini to SE SE X10 X10, but with one big advantage, the Wildfire HTC really is more productive than the SE X10 mini, why? Size. is smaller than its big brother, the HTC Desire, but is small enough to comfortably perform many functions, especially the screen size, it is the full keyboard, without risk of making many mistakes, despite being small, this script would seem to me very uncomfortable, even impossible on a keyboard inside the mini X10 screen. This is very important if we want more than a phone only for calls or multimedia. As for Web browsing, even editing documents, a fluent writing is more than vital. The exclusive environment of HTC, SensMe, it is very practical, at first, even fun. Touch one can feel its strength, is thin, but with metal parts. The screen is a plus (well, two: Multitouch and reliable sensitivity) and a con (despite having an acceptable brightness, pixel density is very low, giving images a bit rough, about easy distinguish the pixels, just close). The camera is a better version than other HTC prior to this model. But acceptable. The ledflash, has a positive side (it is very strong, xenon appears before the camera sensor, to use the images are very bright if they are close, and amazing mind illuminated from a distance) and downside (to be strong many close-ups are not well regulated and the photos come out over-lit, white and without much to see ).... I forgot .... one of its great strengths ...: android OS 2.1! ready for many more applications today.