HTC Wildfire S

HTC WILDFIRE S REVIEW

A Bit Of Background

The HTC Wildfire arrived in mid 2010 while the world was still overly excited for the HTC Desire. The wildfire was as popular if not more popular than the desire due to its look, design and most of all, the price. It was for most people the first affordable smartphone. There were onle two major things that let the Wildfire down, one of these things was the screen resolution. Basically it was terrible! Another bad point of the wildfire was that its processing speeds were slow which meant not much room for multitasking, gaming etc.

But then HTC thought up a new idea. The HTC Wildfire S was launched in 2011 and was set out to be an all round tune up of the previous model. This new phone has a greatly improved screen resolution, a faster processor for all a smartphoner's needs and just generally better. You can currently pick up the Wildfire S for around £200 so not that cheap anymore but do you get your moneys worth?...

Design

There are no physical buttons on the front of the phone with HTC using capacitive touch buttons but the good news is that they are very responsive and with a nifty little vibration feature to tell you when you have touched them is always helpful also you will not be having to continuously button mashing them to do what you want to do. The bad thing about these buttons is that they are very close to the actual screen, and being so sensitive it is very easy to accidentally press one and be redirected off your app and back onto the home screen.

The phone is very small and feels very light in your hand. This is because the phone only weighs around 105 grams so just be careful when holding it in your hand not to drop it. I say this because dropping it can be fateful for your Wildfire S. Being so small it drops everywhere and scratches and chips the outer phone surprisingly easy, i would recommend buying a case ASAP after making the purchase of the phone on amazon etc.

The phones screen size is at 3.2 inches and runs at a screen resolution of 320x480. This type of screen in my opinion is fine and would please most other users new to the smartphone world. The screen thankfully is very responsive so there is no problems there.

As you turn to the back of the phone you will find a 5 megapixel camera which takes some pretty impressive photo shots and video recordings. Also there is a flash for night time shots and a speaker which wont amaze you but its pretty standard. Underneath the back you will find your battery, Sim card and memory card slot. The phone will normally come as standard with a 2GB micro SD card, but this can be expanded up to 64GB if you really need that much space.

Turning to the Sides of the phone there are to physical volume buttons and a micro usb slot used for connecting with the pc and charging.

Usability

The Wildfire S comes with android version 2.3. This includes many features that i will go through now:

- Notification Bar: This handy little invention is improved in this latest version of android. The notification bar will tell you when you have a text/ missed call. It will come up with a list of recently opened apps for quick navigation. It will also tell you when your battery is low or any other problems that are happening to your phone. You can also use the notification bar to quickly turn on/off features like mobile network, WI-fi and Bluetooth etc.

- The Wildifre S does a good job of keeping your phone flowing without lagging and force closing apps due to the RAM being overloaded. occasionally you will have to experience apps force closing because they are to high performance for this phone but thankfully these instances are few and far between. Also with a few apps like angry birds for example, your phone will lag which creates a jerky game experience which leads to the game not playable.

- Also HTC have widgets for the home screen. These are basically icons which will take you to a specific programme/ app(like a pc) These are helpful to use and don't worry about filling up your home screen with them because on the HTC Wildfire S you have 6 home screens to place different widgets on and to personalize to your own imagination.

- Customization and personalization are big players on the Wildfire S. Smartphone users love to play around and the possiblities are endless with HTC. You can customise everything from themes to wallpapers to the way your phone works!

The Phone

The Phone is the icon that is there all the time and will be the thing you ring people off!!!!

Signal on the Wildfire S is not brilliant but its not the Iphone 4 either(Rubbish). You will find that you constantly drop in and out of signal in any type of building you go in but this can be quite rare, but when it happens it stays for a very long time.

You can even personalize your contacts on this phone. You can choose specific ringtones for specific people and also specify a default action when clicking on their contact. ALso you can link contacts with your e-mail, Facebook and twitter accounts to see their latest updates and when their birthday is when they next ring.

Have you ever got annoyed at someone who constantly rings your phone but you dont want to turn your phone off because you may be expecting a call? Well HTC solves this problem for you with the block caller option. When enabled on any contact when they ring you it will go straight to voice mail on their phone and you dont get annoying missed call notifications!!

Messaging on the Wildfire S is a very flowing experience. You can choose to turn predictive on or off but i choose to leave it off due to the phone supporting a qwerty keypad portteait and landscape! This means easy responsive texting although people with big thumbs may find it a bit of a faf with the little letters on portrait mode.

Internet and Apps

The 600 MHz processor on the Wildfire S is great for browsing around the internet although some more advanced websites may take a while to load up. The internet browser uses a tab system as many browsers do now which can be simply used. On most web pages though you will have to zoom in to read paragraphs but this is easily done and it normally fits all the writing into the zoom of your screen so no wiping sideways repeatedly. Although HTC have missed out on a major thing which is no Adobe Flash Player which means saying no to some apps and no to websites like BBC IPlayer.

The range of apps on Android Market Place is astonishing you can get many categories including games, lifestyle, fitness, entertainment and loads more. There are literally 10's of thousands of apps available. It would be impossible to write all the different variates available so all ill say is that it is great and to see for yourself type 'market' into Google and just browse the website.

Conclusion

In conclusion i would say that the Wildfire S is an amazing pick of smartphones especially if your new to the smartphone market. Its greatly improved on the previous model and has fantastic features like a 5mp camera, a wide variety of apps and all of the many personalization options available. There are a few things that let the handset down but all in all the Wildfire S has to be praised for what it is. So if your looking for a smartphone but don't want to go in too high with the price range then this is the phone for you.

Thank you and please rate my review as it did take quite a while to actually put this all together for you guys :)