HTC Wildfire Sim Free Mobile Phone - Metal Mocha

There are plenty of phones out there that will offer something better than the Wildfire. Bigger screen - better resolution - faster processor etc - but they all come at a price. The Wildfire comes in at a brilliant price point and offers a great feature set and a mature user interface (HTC Sense UI). If you trawl through the on line reviews, the biggest criticism is that it only offers a QVGA low res screen. Personally, I decided that it probably wouldn't matter to me as I'm unlikely to watch full length movies on the thing - but it's plenty good enough for you tube and web browsing in my opinion. I'm not disappointed.

The social networking integration is great. Friendstream is a great way to keep track of Twitter and Facebook updates. Smarter still, the phone matches your facebook friends with your contacts - and when they call, you get their latest facebook update and also notification if it's close to their birthday.

As you would expect with an Android handset - gmail integration is there (mail / contacts and calendar). It also connects to Exchange Active sync, which I'm using although it's a Zarafa / Z-Push backend in reality but I have absolutely no problems with it. The calendar appears to aggregate all these sources (including Facebook) in to one so you don't need to check a separate calendar for each.

The Wildfire UI can be customised with widgets and apps. Don't be too worried if you've not faced this before - essentially you can put what you like / where you like on one of the seven Sense UI screens and make the phone your own.

The application support is great. Today, for instance, I installed the latest Google Maps with voice search and also Navigation. The inbuilt GPS allowed me to use this as a Sat Nav unit. Great - I've just saved myself £60 because I no longer have to update the maps on my other Sat Nav device.

I've not had issues with performance or lag in spite of the lower spec CPU compared to the Desire - perhaps the QVGA screen is less demanding.

Ahh yes, the phone bit. Call quality is as good as I've heard on any other handset.

I could go on an on because there's a lot more to say about this little handset but you can tell I'm impressed.

I must admit that I bought my HTC Wildfire in a panic after damaging my HTC Hero beyond economical repair plus working away from home for a long time ruled out the chances of finding the ever popular SIM free HTC Desire or HTC Legend in a normal high street store so I bought the HTC Wildfire knowing that if I didn't like it I could take it back and exchange it for a HTC Desire or HTC Legend and simply pay the difference.

After playing around with it for an hour or two I actually grew to like the Wildfire - it was sleek, well finished, felt great to hold and it seemed to respond faster than my HTC Hero, needless to say I ended keeping my Wildfire for a number of valid reasons;

"5 MegaPixel camera with LED flash and autofocus"
I'm not a photographer or an expert but I've taken a few photos with the HTC Wildfire's snapper and its pretty good at taking pictures. The software is easy to use and its quite fast as well.

"Android 2.1 with HTC Sense"
The combination of Google's brilliant operating system and HTC's excellent skinning software has catapulted handsets like the Wildfire, the Hero, the Legend and the Desire into the iPhone league and arguably way beyond the Apple offering. Slick looking HTC widgets and apps such as a choice of twelve beautifully crafted live clocks to put on the home screen as you see fit, info sharing widgets such as the stocks, news, animated weather, web bookmarks, email, SMS messaging, twitter and facebook offerings to mention just a few.

"Android Market app store"
Universally slammed for not having as many apps as the iPhone offering it's still the fastest growing app store outside Apple - here's a few essential apps that I can't do without;

3 cubed music player - (available free from the market) taking the "cover flow" concept to a whole new level - listen to and navigate your music collection via a rotating 3D album art cube. Also has the ability to find missing album art via the web and check the concert schedule of the artistes in your music folder.

Amazon Kindle app - (available free) The famous e-book reader is now available on Android and it works brilliantly.

Amazon MP3 - (available free) Works exactly like the iTunes music store on the iPhone, I've bought many an album this way.

DoubleTwist - (available free for Mac, PC and Android) Basically does what iTunes does for the iPhone, provides seamless media synching options between your phone and computer.

Spotify - (free to download, need subscription to work) The ever popular music database, access thousands of tracks for a flat subscription rate LEGALLY! You can even download music for off line listening.

Google search by voice - (free to download) Does exactly what it says on the tin, with the added bonus of working quite well. You can even ask for directions to landmarks or maps and will even bring up contacts in you phone book.

Google Maps with street view and navigation - (free to download) Simply awesome, enough said!

I could go on but I wouldn't even scratch the surface of what this phone could do, so in brief;

Things I love about the HTC Wildfire:

- Great styling and build quality

- Responsive and smooth operation

- Good camera

- FM Radio

- Android 2.1 with HTC Sense (strong operating system enhanced by HTC's brilliant skinning efforts)

- Really good call handling abilities

- Excellent multi-touch browser with flash support

- Awesome Google app integration (Calendar, Contacts, Gmail). Seamless Google "cloud" interaction has made synching to my laptop a thing of the past.

- Android Market, some very useful apps on this platform

Things that may cause problems with the HTC Wildfire (although not for me)

- Old school low resolution display

- Touch sensitive controls at the bottom of the screen may take a while to get used to

- Some Android apps are not optimised for the small screen size of the Wildfire and therefore won't show up in the Android market.

Overall, the HTC Wildfire feels like a premium handset and offers unbeatable value for money - I'm a happy customer!

The HTC Wildfire is a firm 4 star phone. The reasoning behind this being that the HTC desire is widely viewed as a 5 star phone, and the Wildfire being it's smaller cousin does pretty much everything the desire can do but has a slower processor, slightly less memory and an inferior screen.

The reason you are considering the Wildfire is because it is smaller but supports everything the Desire does. The 5mp camera, Sense UI, Wifi, 3G, GRPS are all here. And even more the Wildfire fits in the hand better than the lengthy Desire. The screen is supposedly inferior, but I found the LCD to be slightly easier to see in direct sunlight than the Desire which is more reflective. The "poorer" viewing angles of an LCD screen are apparent here, but less colour distortion that other phones I've used.

When it comes to attention to detail, the HTC Wildfire has all the bases covered. The way you switch to silent mode, the way the phone unlocks, the intuitiveness of the interface. It's clear to see that every part of the software has been clearly thought out. Generally navigating the interface is a smooth experience, but there are times, where there is a slight pause or delay as the phone attempts to fetch data to move to the next screen. To be honest the Desire has these moments too, but generally, if you compare this and the Desire side by side, the Wildfire appears a little sluggish. On it's own, the sluggishness is unnoticeable and only when viewing some videos is it clear the processor struggles. Hopefully the 2.2 update coming to the Wildfire at the end of this year should improve things. Some users claim the Android 2.2 update speeds up the phone by up to 3x.

I've had this phone for a few days now and the only downside here is the low resolution of the screen when viewing web pages (it is perfect everywhere else). Text when fully zoomed out is not sharp like the Desire and appears blurry, so whereas you can read most text when fully zoomed out on a Desire or Nexus One phone, the Wildfire requires you to zoom into a page to read it's contents. Luckily HTC have some brilliant software that renders zoomed in text nice and crisply and will autofit it to the screen. Good Save for what could have made web browsing very fustrating. Otherwise web browsing works identically to the Desire with multitouch and pinch zooming.

In conclusion the made reason to opt for this phone over the desire is the price point. This is the budget phone for the new Android user that does everything it's older brother does functionality wise. If you have Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and a Google Account, this phone will become the hub of your media activities. Exchange support is a nice add too.