HTC is on a roll, with the excellent HTC Desire and HTC Legend handsets selling well in Australia and throughout Asia and Europe, while the Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G selling like hotcakes in the US. Next up for the Taiwanese smartphone maker down under is the HTC Wildfire, a smaller, less powerful version of the Desire. Do good things come in small packages? Or more importantly, how much smartphone do you get for AU$350?
Design
At first glance you'll immediately see elements of HTC's latest phones: the Desire, Nexus One and HD mini rolled into one tight little package. The combination of brushed aluminium and soft-touch rubber house with a 3.2-inch touchscreen is one of the sturdiest and sexiest bodies you'll find on any phone in this price range. The Wildfire is just about the perfect size for people who use their phones mostly for calling, with its curved base fitting snugly in the palm. The touchscreen is good too, making use of a capacitive touch panel and being extremely responsive.
Below the screen is a row of capacitive touch buttons for navigating the Android operating system, and below them is an optical trackpad. On the rear you'll find a large-looking camera lens on top of a 5-megapixel sensor, with a bright LED flash to the right. Music lovers will appreciate the 3.5mm headphone socket, and everyone should see value in the microSD card slot below the battery cover, complete with a 2GB card in the box.
One element we don't love is the way the aluminium on the side of the handset sits above the rubber where it meets, creating an almost sharp edge. This might sound like a minor complaint, and it is, but every time we pick up the Wildfire this metal edge pulls against the skin on our fingers. Something tells us that if we bought this phone, we'd end up taking a file to it to dull that edge.
Pixels and power
So far the Wildfire reads almost identically to the HTC Desire — a phone that costs over twice as much. The differences can only really be spotted once you start using the phone. The excellent touchscreen is only of a QVGA resolution (240x320 pixels) and it's painfully obvious. HTC's gorgeous Sense user interface looks retro at this resolution, like it's been ported onto a Commodore Amiga or similar. The pixels jump out at you, with all of the elements of the interface surrounded by jagged edges.
In terms of power, the Wildfire packs about half as much processing grunt and RAM as the Desire, and the result is a smartphone that needn't be tested by 3D animations of any sort. We ran the Neocore Android benchmark just for fun and saw a 5-frames-per-second result and loads of elements in the animation that just didn't render correctly. To this end, there is no Live Wallpaper feature on the Wildfire, even though it runs Android version 2.1.
Impressively, these are the only concerns to make note of, and certainly areas we would expect to see downsizing in making the Wildfire such a cheap handset to buy outright. The best analogy we could think of is the difference between a gaming PC and a netbook. When you buy a netbook you do so understanding the strengths and weaknesses of such a device, in that you can't, for example, run Crysis on an EeePC. The same goes here, if you buy the Wildfire don't expect it to happily run the most graphics-intensive apps on the Android Market.
Smarty pants
The above caveat aside, let's take a look at what the Wildfire can do. Calls and messaging is a breeze, especially with Swype for all text input around the phone. Swype replaces the standard tap-to-type keyboard with one that has you draw lines between the different letters in a word to type it — trust us, it sounds weird, but once you Swype you can't go back.
Email is handled either by the all-in-one email client, or the stand-alone Gmail app. Navigation is mostly handled by Google Maps, though as a Telstra phone you also have the Whereis turn-by-turn subscription option at your disposal. The star pupil in this smarty-pants smartphone is the multi-touch-capable WebKit web browser, which is just as capable as the browser on the Desire (but slower), to render pages due to the slower processor on-board. The browsing capabilities alone are enough to recommend this phone on, which is extremely rare to see with a prepaid price tag.
The 5-megapixel camera is decent, managing to capture colourful and well-focused images. The software is extremely slow to use, and we'd hate to imagine what would happen if proud parents tried to capture baby's first steps with this camera, but for everyone else a little patience should garner some nice pics. With video playback, you'll need to watch the size and quality of the files you intend to play. We have a test file we use on most new phones, which the Wildfire struggled to play at a watchable frame rate.
On the topic of multimedia, HTC has recently released a new version of its HTC Sync software for PC, now offering users the chance to sync media and documents with their desktop, and not just calendar and contacts like previously. The software is nicely laid out, but limited in its utility. You can sync music by folders or by iTunes playlists, but not by artists (unless the artist lives in a separate folder on your PC). Likewise, you can't manually select videos and photos to sync, only the folders they live in, and the software doesn't optimise videos for the low-powered device. All in all, you're probably better off syncing the old way — drag and drop.
Overall
To get the price down this low, there are going to be trade-offs, and all things considered we think HTC has picked these areas well. The lower resolution screen is obviously crumbier to look at, but it's not off-putting or detrimental to any of the phone's major functions. The slower processor could be a deal-breaker for some, but as with all computers, you get what you pay for, and you just can't buy a 1GHz processor in a phone for under AU$500 at this time.
If you imagine all tasks that can be performed by smartphones, and you take away 3G gaming and high-quality video playback, the Wildfire should be capable of just about everything else. For those who not only want a phone to make calls with and send messages, but to also email and surf the web, then the Wildfire will fit the bill nicely.
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