IMPORTANCE OF HTC WILDFIRE

                                          

HTC doesn't go in for masses of custom software for connecting your handset to a PC or Mac. Considering some of the abominations other manufacturers have come out with (looking at you, Samsung and Sony Ericsson), it's probably just as well the HTC Wildfire is simply treated like an external storage device when plugged into a computer via USB. Copying songs, video files and documents across is as easy as copying them between folders on your desktop. Network coverage on O2 was standard, pretty good most of the time with only the occasional blackspot.

We did suffer a couple of call cut-outs for no apparent reception-related reason, and at least one text message delivery was delayed by several hours. It's not clear if this was a network or handset issue. GPS on the HTC Wildfire was far better than handsets in a similar price-bracket, for example the Sony Ericsson Vivaz which struggled to locate us after twenty-minutes of trying.

The HTC Wildfire managed to find us almost every time we opened the map app. Unfortunately, the location service for the weather widget on the home screen was another story – it was so flaky that at one point it thought we were in New York City when we were, in fact, in Somerset.

Getting set up on Wi-Fi is covered by the handy set-up guide the first time you turn the HTC Wildfire on.

There's always a notification when an open Wi-Fi network is in range, and the handset will remember Wi-Fi networks you've connected to recently so you don't need to repeatedly mess about with WEP keys and passwords for familiar networks.

Comparison

HTC has given the budget Android phone a go before – it didn't go so well. The HTC Tattoo was a horribly toy-esque resistive touchscreen handset.

The HTC Wildfire, however, makes good on all the promise of that cramped little handset. With fewer buttons clogging up the front panel, a capacitive screen and a more mature design, it blows the HTC Tattoo out of the water.
                                        
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the likenesses between the HTC Wildfire its older brother, the HTC Desire. A powerhouse of a handset, the Desire is one of the few ever to score five stars in a TechRadar review.

Aside from lower processing power, screen quality and size, the two handsets are very much alike; and we can't say we felt the loss as much as we were expecting to.

Although we did find the screen a little cramped on the HTC Wildfire and watching video content was nowhere near as satisfying as on the Desire's lovely AMOLED screen – but that processor held up well and we could easily get by.

Although the Wildfire's screen is small, we were happy to have the QWERTY keypad layout and great zoom facilities for web browsing.

If you fancy something even smaller, we'd point you in the direction of the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini, another Android smartphone-lite with similar capabilities to the Wildfire but a completely different Android experience.

The HTC Wildfire even manages to give older models of the iPhone a run for their money; with Android's flexibility and customisation, in many ways it's a nicer handset to use than the iPhone 3G.

Sadly, the iPhone App Store continues its vast superiority to the up-and-coming Android App Market; but its day will come – eventually…

If considered a mid-range handset, in a bracket with the likes of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz and LG GW620 InTouch Pro, the HTC Wildfire easily takes the crown. It's a combination of sleek, mature styling, ease of use and speedy web browsing that makes it the best in group.

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SPECIFICATION OF HTC WILDFIRE

We've long-held the belief that what the mobile phone market needs is a small, low-cost handset that packs in all the key features of top end smartphones and is reasonably well made. We've had reasonably feature-packed cheap handsets like the T-Mobile Pulse and we've had small handsets like the HTC Tattoo and HTC Smart, but none has yet delivered on all fronts. Hoping to finally crack the nut is the HTC Wildfire.
                              
What makes this phone special is that, while its processor is only 528MHz and its screen only 3.2in with a resolution of just 240 x 320, it retains all the build quality of its bigger siblings. Indeed, this can be thought of as the child of the HTC Desire and Google Nexus One sporting as it does the key features of these two handsets, namely the metal and soft-touch plastic construction, glass capacitive touchscreen, touch sensitive buttons, and an optical trackball.

That combination of factors makes this easily the most attractive small Android handset we’ve seen. The taupe metal sections and grey soft-touch plastic create a great muted combination of colours, while the smooth expanse of that glass screen looks as good as ever. Moreover, this is as well put together as any handset we've ever seen (iPhone 4 aside) and really just highlights our problems with the build quality of more premium handsets like the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and Samsung Galaxy S – if HTC can do it at this price than those handsets should be just as good for twice the price.

The phone's small size also makes it nicer to handle than many larger handsets. Certainly it's a darn sight easier to reach with one hand the screen unlock button on the top edge of the phone. Admittedly with dimensions of 106.8 x 60.4 x 12 mm, it's not the smallest of small handsets so it may still be too hefty for some. However, it is around 8-12mm shorter than the big-guns and around 20g lighter as well.

Along with the unlock button there is a headphone jack on the top edge, while the left is home to a volume control and microUSB socket for charging and plugging the phone into a PC. There sadly isn't a dedicated camera button, which makes taking photos slightly cumbersome. At least the camera application is fast and easy to use and produces acceptable quality photos of up to 5 megapixels. As ever they're still some way off even a basic dedicated compact but will do for the occasional snap of friends. However, video is rather let down by a low resolution of 320 x 240 that is simply not enough to see any sort of detail. At least with an LED, you can capture both videos and photos in the dark.

Update: Upon further investigation, we came to the conclusion that the images and video we first assessed were hampered by a smudged lens. We've now updated the above paragraph pertaining to the camera quality and updated the samples pictures at the end of this review.

Upon seeing the row of touch sensitive buttons that run underneath the screen we were very apprehensive as those on the Nexus One were rather poor. Thankfully there are no issues with those on the Wildfire, in fact they're very responsive and easy to use. We still feel, however, that Android devices in general have too many buttons – the search and back buttons in particular are superfluous and should be replicated in software on a touchscreen device.
                            
Likewise, while the optical trackpad that sits below the buttons works very well, it is so seldom used that it really could/should be dropped. In fact this is one thing the Samsung Galaxy S got spot on as it used just three buttons (home, back, menu) and no trackball of any description.

Take the back off and you'll find a 1300mAh battery, which is slightly less than the 1500mAh cells you get on most larger phones. Nevertheless, due to the smaller screen, we found battery life was on a par with those devices. Typically you'll want to charge every night or you'll be running very low towards the end of day two, but conservative users might stretch to three days. Thankfully you don't have to remove the battery to reach the microSD slot, which lets you add up to 32GB of storage to the miserly 128MB built-in.

Turn on the Widlfire and inevitably the low resolution of its screen is immediately obvious; pretty much everything looks pixellated and almost blurry. There's no denying it's a limiting factor. Certainly you won't want to watch high quality videos, view many pictures, or read large amounts of text (i.e. eBooks) on it. However, in general use it's absolutely fine. Normal web browsing, reading emails and texts, navigating on Google Maps, and using Facebook is easy to do without too much hassle.

One potential problem is that some Android apps don't support such a low resolution, with games being the obvious casualty. The vast majority of general productivity apps do, however, as do some games. Potentially more of a problem is that the soon-to-be-released version of Android, 3.0 Gingerbread, has a minimum hardware requirement that will mean it definitely won't work on this device.

As it ships, the Wildfire comes with the 2.1 version of Android, which is one step behind the latest 2.2 version that adds native Adobe Flash support, quick switch multi-language keyboards, and many other small improvements. However, 2.1 is still very capable and we expect a 2.2 update to arrive at some point.

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