| HTC Wildfire S: The first Wildfire from HTC spread almost like its moniker, so popular did its blend of HTC Sense, durable form factor and affordable pricing prove Price from: £220 |
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Reviews
The handset carries on the legacy well enough, with an impressively solid chassis, great social features and responsive touchscreen. The market's changed since the first Wildfire blazed its trail into history, though. With dual-core 'superphones' to contend with, it's hard to consider a 600Mhz processor hot stuff.
And while HTC's Sense interface proves as compelling as ever, the lack of grunt means missing out on Flash support for iPlayer and the like.
All that wouldn't matter if the Wildfire S only required liberating a token sum from your account, but you'll need a fair few sheets burning a hole in your pocket (around £220 SIM-free, or £15 a month) to lay claim to this little fella.
Control of the device comes thanks to the four touch buttons across the bottom of the display. Given the small frame of the phone they don’t have much space, but we didn’t find this to be too much of a problem: the occasional brush of the left-hand home button would see us dive out of an app, but this was a rarity. Elsewhere aside from the home, menu, back and search controls you have the power/standby button and the volume controls.
What is Good.
Overall the HTC Wildfire S is a tidy little package. The good touch response and design reflect well on what is essentially a budget device. It can be bettered by its rivals - there will be affordable phones with a larger higher resolution display, there will be those that get a higher power processor, but if you’re less interested in consuming movie content or playing mobile games, then the HTC Wildfire S will stand you in good stead.
The most important factor for us is that we’ve found the HTC Wildfire S capable to performing those core tasks without too much of a compromise
What Bad
There is no camera button, so controlling the camera comes in the form of touchscreen controls. This isn’t the basic Android camera either, as it too has had the standard HTC treatment. Rated at 5-megapixels, it holds up its end of the bargain supplying reasonable results adequate for sharing or sending to friends. The camera suffers the regular failings of mobile phone cameras, struggling in bright conditions and not really coping with high-contrast subjects. The on-screen autofocusing and shutter action means that you’ll often experience a delay before the shot is fired, so capturing moving objects leaves a little to be desired.
Wildfire S we found it to be stable, and didn’t detect any significant problems with the day-to-day running of the phone. Understand that this isn’t a powerhouse and you’ll get on just fine with the features it has on offer. The battery life isn’t particularly strong and you’ll still need to charge it every night to make it through the day, if you the sort of person who likes to keep your hand in with Twitter and Facebook every 5 minutes. Heavy calling or data use will take its toll on the device so keep your eye on the battery levels
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