HTC Wildfire

Discontinued
17th May 2010

The HTC Wildfire is designed to be a lower cost companion to the HTC Desire, bringing HTC's useful HTC Sense and Friend Stream applications into a handset that's more affordable than the top-of-the-line Desire smartphone.

Inside is a fairly modest 528MHz processor, quite a lot slower than the Desire and even the HTC Legend, and the same as found in the HTC Tattoo. The specification and anticipated Q3 release indicate that this might be the replacement for the Tattoo, but with a vastly improved specification. The Wildfire's 384MB of RAM should be sufficient for most applications.

The display is a 240 x 320 pixel panel, which is about as basic as Android phones get.. although at 3.2" it's certainly a usable size. On the back is a 5 megapixel camera with an LED flash and autofocus, which should be good enough for the vast majority of customers, although the Nokia N8 has 12 megapixels and broadly the same target market.

This is an Android 2.1 device, and in addition to the HTC applications we have already mentioned, there are a huge number of applications available in the Android market, many of them free. While the iPhone may have more apps available, Android developers aren't subject to Apple's restrictions in what can be written, so Android owners probably have a wider choice of types of app they can run.

One novel feature with the HTC Wildfire is to be able to recommend an application to friends via SMS, email or a social networking site. This is a good idea in practice as it will help to find decent applications in the very crowded Android Market, but it is easy to see that this feature could be abused.

This is a 3.5G device with download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 384 Kbps on HSPA. The HTC Wildfire supports WiFi as well, as well as quad-band GSM. GPS and a digital compass are included, and the Wildfire should have access to Google's new free turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps.

Android 2.1 will cope with most types of media file, and there is also an FM radio and 3.5mm audio socket. Of course, the Wildfire comes with a microSD slot for storing music and video clips.

The HTC Wildfire should be available during Q3 2010 (our sources say July in the UK) in white, black, red and brown colours. There's no indication of price although our best guess is that it will retail for between €250 to €300 when it hits the streets.

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