By Lim Pei Hao
At a Glance
Pros:
- Responsive touchscreen
- Android 2.1 with HTC Sense
- Affordable
Cons:
- Touchscreen is too close to the edge of the phone
- Camera does not focus well


In the box
- HTC Wildfire transceiver - 2GB MicroSD Card - Charger - USB Cable - Handset - Manual

Exterior, Controls and Screen

HTC Wildfire is a candybar device which is also known as the HTC Desire mini. Measuring at 106.75 x 60.4 x 12.99 mm and weighing about 118g with the battery, the device fits just right on my palm. Thanks to the rubberised back cover, it adds on a firmness when holding the device. The face of the device is the 3.2-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen. There are 4 touch buttons (home, menu, back and search) located at the end of the touchscreen. In addition, there is a small circular button that is also acts as an optical trackpad.
The power switch is located on the top right of the device and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left. Both the volume controller and micro-USB port are on the left side of the phone. There are no buttons on the right side of the Wildfire, while the microphone is located at the bottom.


Overall, the Wildfire has a good capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. It is able to register every touch without any glitches, allowing a user to surf through the homescreens or gallery of apps smoothly. Multi-touch is fully supported in Android 2.1 and it works perfectly when pinching the image or website to zoom. The optical trackpad also provide an alternative navigation from using the touchscreen On the other hand, we found out that we are prone to accidental touches especially on the search touch button when holding the device. This is probably because there is little allowance between the surface of the touchscreen and the edge of the phone. Furthermore, the display is readable under the direct sunlight.
As usual, the majority of the touchscreen phones share the common issue of being a fingerprint magnet. Users should carry a wiping cloth at all times.



Features

The Wildfire is powered by a 528MHz Qualcomm processor and running on HTC Sense on top of Android 2.1 (Éclair). HTC Sense provides a tweak on the Android OS to make it unique from its competitors. It comes with 7 homescreens that are fully customisable. Users will be able to add widgets, apps, shortcuts or folders to any of the homescreens. HTC widgets are apps made by HTC that allows user to download without going through Google Marketplace. Moreover, users could pinch any of the homescreens to view the snapshot of all seven homescreens, and tap to leap into any one without the traditional scrolling.
In addition, HTC Sense also integrates the user’s contacts with Facebook’s contacts. It inserts relevant information such as profile pictures and birthdays into the contact book. Friend Stream is also a feature part of HTC Sense that allows user to view social networking updates like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Plurk. The user is also able to update his/her status, tweets or photos via Friend Stream. The Friend Stream widget displays the latest updates or tweets from the social networking on the user’s homescreen.


The Wildfire includes a number of handy applications – alarm, timer, stopwatch, world clock, calculator, digital compass, flashlight, music player, Quickoffice and PDF viewer.
As usual, any device that is running on Google Android will have the user’s contacts, calendar events, emails are automatically synced to Google Account via the Internet. It also has the Google search bar which able to search all the information contained such as contacts, messages and apps in the phone or through the World Wide Web. Google Marketplace is accessible but only limited to free apps.
alternatively, HTC Sync is available from HTC official site that enable user to synchronise calendar, people, music, photo, bookmark and document into a PC. An application installer is also provided as an alternative to install apps into the device as long the user has the apk file of the app.
The keyboard layout in the Wildfire looks a little cramped when viewed in the portrait mode. However, it is able to accurately register every finger stroke correctly. The predictive text input speeds up on composing a message without the need of typing the entire words.
Camera/Video

The Wildfire is equipped with a 5-megapixel camera with a maximum resolution of 2592 x1952 pixel jpeg photos. In addition, it is also comes with LED flash, auto-focus and geo-tagging function. The camera’s UI is simple and easy, as actions like switching the flash on and off can be achieved by pressing the button on the screen. In addition, there are 6 built-in effect to choose from, such as grayscale, sepia, negative, solarise, posterise and aqua. However, the quality of the image produced tends to be inconsistent, as some of the photos we took seem to be out-of-focus or blur even with the help of auto-focus. The device is also capable of recording video at the resolution of 352 x 288 in 3gp format.

Connectivity

The Wildfire is a quad-band device, and also supports 3G with HSDPA of 7.2Mbps, 802.11 b/g WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. In addition, the Wildfire could be converted into a wireless router for Internet sharing.
Verdict

Overall, the device is decent with some minor drawbacks. It is a powerful and affordable Android device and suitable for business users who need a great organiser. The device is also built with social networking in mind, linking Google and Facebook contacts together. Unlike its other HTC siblings, the HTC Wildfire is reasonably priced at RM 1,199. Tags : HTC Wildfire