HTC Wildfire review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Introduction
Occasionally HTC takes a little break from high-end smartphones and dips its toes in the waters of the lower midrange. The HTC Wildfire is a down-sized, down-clocked and down-priced version of the HTC Desire. If Sony Ericsson can do it with the X10 mini, then HTC have all the right in the world to make a Desire mini too.
But while the Desire was something that easily snatched everybody’s attention, the Wildfire is a bit more toned down despite its fire-some name.
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Key features
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- 3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA
- Android OS v2.1 (Éclair) with Sense UI
- 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen of QVGA resolution
- Multi-touch support
- Qualcomm MSM 7225 528 MHz CPU, 384 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
- 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash and touch focus
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Turn-to-mute, lift-to-tone-down
- Proximity sensor
- Smart dialing
- Standard miniUSB port for charging and data
- Bluetooth with A2DP, file transfers
- microSD card slot, a 2GB card in the box
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- Social network integration: Facebook, Twitter and Flickr through Friend Stream
- Flash-enabled browser
- Direct access to the official Android repository
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
Main disadvantages
- Poor screen image quality, QVGA doesn’t do Android OS and the display size justice
- No video-call camera or videocalling whatsoever
- CIF@15fps video recording (352 x 288 pixels) is below par
- No voice dialing
- No DivX or XviD video support out of the box
- No TV-out port
The Wildfire is certainly the right phone for those who like to always stay in touch. The high-end connectivity is all there, along with solid social network integration and browsing. It seems the display and CPU are the only downgrades from the Desire.
But that’s still a lot. Android phones with QVGA screens have failed to impress and the size of the Wildfire’s display gives no reason to be optimistic here.
Eclair and HTC Sense deserve a higher-res screen
HTC Sense and Android have had a god run so far. From the Hero to the Desire, users have been treated to a wealth of graphics and features. Even the entry-level HTC Tattoo has the company’s custom interface, which we found to blend well and do a good job. It just didn’t look its best on the QVGA screen.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know the HTC Wildfire is having the same problem. And this time, the same number of pixels is stretched over 3.2 inches.
The Wildfire still has a clear advantage over the Tattoo. The capacitive display has excellent response. You’ll find the latest Sense UI too on the HTC Wildfire.
The main differences between this version of the Sense UI and back on the Tattoo are the new context icons, a few new wallpapers and the unified Widget section. Whether you are using the People, Mail, Music or Gallery Tabs, the scrollable icons at the bottom will please you with new color skins. We like it this way – the old ones looked a bit dull against the otherwise graphically rich and colorful UI..
The left key at the bottom of the screen launches the main menu. This time around you simply tap to get to it, you can’t drag the menu out, though you can drag it back in.
The middle key is a shortcut to the Phone app and the right key brings up the “Add to Home” menu. And there’s plenty to add to the homescreen but more on that later.
The scrollbar at the bottom is just an indication of which homescreen you’re on – it can’t be used for actual scrolling. HTC have extended the homescreen to a total of seven panes instead of the usual three. With all those widgets at hand (which are quite useful too) they may not even be enough.
The HTC Sense UI revolves around Scenes, which are essentially six custom homescreen setups (Work, Travel, Social, etc). Each scene changes the wallpaper and the widgets on the homescreen – for instance, the Work scene has a stocks widget, while the Social offers a Twitter widget.
You can’t modify the scenes but if you rearrange the current homescreen you are prompted to save changes as a new scene.
The Clean slate scene lets you start from scratch – it’s just the default Android setup with a Clock and a few shortcuts underneath.
Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds but sure allows wide customization – the business and personal modes that some competing phones offer seem quite limited compared to the HTC Scenes.
Socialized phonebook
HTC Wildfire features the same powerful phonebook we first saw on the Hero. It resembles the one from the HTC TouchFLO but considerably extends its functionality.
Selecting a contact displays the basic details: name and photo, numbers, emails and such. What you’d notice though is that there are another five tabs at the bottom and you’re just viewing the first of them.
Messaging
The HTC Wildfire can handle all common types of messages – SMS, MMS and email. Google Talk is in charge of instant messaging. Email support is excellent with support for Exchange out of the box and social media buffs will be pleased with the level of integration of that content as well.
The on-screen full QWERTY keyboard on the HTC Wildfire works in both portrait and landscape modes. Button size is decent and sensitivity just fine and we had no problems using the keyboard.
Multi-touch image gallery
The gallery has the usual main menu list-with-thumbnail structure. The Albums app automatically locates images and videos no matter where they are stored. Images and videos stored in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder – quite effective file management.
Unfortunately, the gallery will start reindexing the content each time you open it and it does so even when you open a file for an instant and then get back to the thumbnail view. And that’s a bugger as when cards are full of content it’s quite slow to complete.
Right next to the folder’s name is a figure indicating the number of images stored. Each sub-album has a thumbnail of the latest image. The contextual menu of the main Album view has a single shortcut to the settings menu. There is also a camera shortcut, but it’s only available once you start browsing any of the sub-folders.
Poor video player
Video files can be accessed only from the Albums’ subfolder as there is no dedicated video player icon in the main menu. The video files can also be viewed as a grid or filmstrip and can be shared via Gmail, HTC mail, Messages or YouTube.
Familiar music player
As with the rest of the multimedia department, the music player is the same as in the HTC Legend and the Desire.
The standard music library view is the Artists section, but you can easily switch to one of the other six tabs beneath, which are for Albums, All Songs, Playlists, Genres, Composers and Purchased.
FM radio
The HTC Wildfire is also equipped with an FM radio, which has a pretty simple interface. It automatically scans for the available stations and allows you to mark some of them as favorite for easier scrolling. It also supports RDS and allows loudspeaker playback.
Good audio quality
The audio guts of the HTC Wildfire are probably identical to what you can find inside the HTC Tattoo. As we already managed to confirm they are able to provide nicely clean audio output and pretty decent loudness (though the Tattoo is a tiny bit louder).
The noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk are the best part of the HTC Wildfire audio output, but the frequency response is virtually spotless too. The distortion levels aren’t the best we have seen but they are very good nonetheless.
A 5 megapixel snapper
HTC Wildfire has a 5 megapixel camera for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1936 pixels and a LED flash. At least on paper, the Wildfire seems just as capable in terms of still imaging as the high-end HTC Desire.
Thanks to Android 2.1 the Wildfire has a camera interface that is competitive outside the Google OS world. There are a number of customizable settings ranging from ISO speed to aspect ratio and auto focus.
We are yet to see modern-day features such as face, smile and blink detection for example, but the gap is closing.
CIF video
HTC Wildfire records CIF videos at 15 fps, which is nothing to be excited about.
The camcorder interface is similar to the still camera’s and there is a surprising (by Android standards) number of customizable options. You can set the video resolution, encoding type and recording limit.
As far as image adjustments are concerned you get exposure compensation, contrast, saturation and sharpness settings as well as color effects and white balances settings.
Rich connectivity
The HTC Wildfire offers a wide range of connectivity options. You get quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE securing worldwide roaming and dual-band (900/2100 MHz) 3G with HSDPA. The HSDPA is quoted at 7.2Mbps.
Moving on to local connectivity – the Wildfire offers USB v2.0 connectivity via a microUSB port, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP support and Wi-Fi. Now that they’ve enabled Bluetooth transfers there is very little more to ask for.
Internet tethering is also available via the microUSB port and it’s easy as pie to use. Just select tethering when prompted to choose connection mode. HTC have also thought of users without a data plan and allows them to explicitly forbid access to the mobile network internet.
Excellent web browser, Flash and all
The great web browsing skills have been an inherent part of the Android platform since day one. Now that we are at version 2.1 things are even sweeter with the intuitive user interface even more polished and the functionality reaching new heights.
The user interface is pretty much nonexistent at first glance. With pinch-zooming enabled you don’t even need the +/- zoom buttons that we have seen on most other Android handsets.
The address bar is locked at the top of the page so you can scroll down and hide that too. However you don’t need to scroll to the top every time you want to tap a new address – just press the menu button and invoke it anywhere on the page.
The Wildfire browser also supports double tap zooming and text reflow, for comfortable reading of longer texts on the phone display. Without text reflow you will either have to zoom out until the text fits (but then it’s too small to read comfortably) or scroll sideways to read each line.
The minimalist UI is still quite powerful – hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, open bookmarks. The last button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.).
Organizer and apps
The HTC Wildfire comes with the usual set of organizing apps. It also has a preinstalled document viewer, which handles office files just fine.
The Quickoffice app can view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including the Office 2007 versions.
For editing, you will need to get the paid app though. There is also a PDF viewer app that handles the PDF files.
GPS and Google maps
The HTC Wildfire comes with a built-in GPS receiver. It got satellite lock in just over two minutes without the A-GPS on, which isn’t too bad at all.
Google Maps is standard equipment in any Android package and of course makes an appearance on the Wildfire as well. Unfortunately, voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation by Google Maps still has limited availability (US and a few European countries).
Android Market is growing
The QVGA screen is limiting in terms of compatible content on the Android market. The market applies automatic filtering, listing only applications compatible with the QVGA resolution.
The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and above them, three sections (Applications, Games and Downloads). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.
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