A few important tweaks have turned the original Wildfire into a must-have at the low-end of the market
Until HTC announced its flagship dual-core monster, the HTC Sensation, it seemed 2011 was simply going to be a repeat of HTC in 2010, with popular handsets like the Desire and Wildfire reappearing as the Desire S and Wildfire S.
One year on, and the Desire S has failed to capture the same level of excitement as the original, especially with better models available like the Desire HD, Incredible S and the Sensation.
However, in the case of the Wildfire S, things have definitely changed for the better. At a much lower end of the market, this is a very important phone for HTC. With mass-market appeal, the handset has to be good, given how it’s up against lots of competition.
The original Wildfire was small enough, but the Wildfire S is even smaller in every dimension bar depth, where the phone has fattened out by 4mm. It has also lost weight, although the difference is hardly going to be noticed.
Screen
What you will notice is the screen. It’s the same size, but a higher resolution. A QVGA (240×320 pixels) really does seem out of date these days unless you’re buying an incredibly cheap phone. The switch to HVGA (320×480 pixels) makes a huge difference, just as the Sony Ericsson X8’s screen did over the X10 mini’s. Not surprising, given there are now twice the number of pixels. The screen is capacitive, too.
What you probably won’t notice, even if you already have a Wildfire, is the removal of the optical navigation control below the screen. Rarely used, HTC has done away with it, just as it did with the Desire S. It’s one aspect that surely won’t be missed.
The original Wildfire already had a decent camera and it’s unchanged here. Five megapixels is arguably all most people need from a camera-phone. In fact, it’s possibly more than most people need, especially if they’re going to be looking at the pictures on a normal monitor or emailing them.
The camera interface is more limited in features than higher-end models, although you do get geotagging and face-detection support. On the video side, the phone captures at VGA-resolution, meaning no HD or even widescreen.
The processor isn’t much different either, so don’t expect it to match the Desire S for speed. At 600MHz, it ranks quite far down on the benchmarking stats, but it still copes fine with normal operation. It’s only when running the most processor-hungry apps that you’ll notice things slowing down. It rules out the Wildfire S supporting Adobe Flash, an app that always needs plenty of power and memory.
A year ago, 512MB of RAM was high-end. Now it’s average, but enough to keep most of your apps running in the background to ensure a quick jump from one to another: even using the dialler or sending a message requires the loading
of the relevant app.
Full article in Mobile News issue 491 (June 20, 2011).
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