HTC Wildfire S

Overview

Limelight Snatcher

HTC wildfire S is a semi-smartphone whose target audience is people who want to have a smartphone but are restricted by the budget.

HTC wildfire S Design and Build Quality

The body of the phone is made of aluminium with a glass screen. The body has a soft plastic finish. The phone weighs 105 grams, which is pretty much the standard average weight of smartphones in the market. The dimensions of the phone are 59.4x101.3x12.4 mm and the screen is 3.2 inch. At 12.4 mm, the screen is thicker than its counterparts are but is not uncomfortable to hold. The phone will look like a bulge in your pocket because of its width. The quality of the phone is good although much cannot be said about its battery. The battery barely lasted 5 hours with full usage, which is a drawback.

User Interface and Comfort to Use HTC wildfire S

The phone has a 600MhZ ARM 11 processor with 512 MB of RAM. Most of the RAM is taken up by the OS and inbuilt apps and you don’t have much space to download more apps. Also with too many apps, we noticed that the phone becomes somewhat slow in operation. The phone runs on Android Gingerbread OS (upgradable to later versions). The touch screen experience with 3.2 inch, 320 x 480 pixels TFT capacitive screen is quite smooth we enjoyed using HTC sense 2.1 on it. However, when it comes to message typing or tying emails, the phone’s interface is disappointing, as the keyboard feels cramped on the screen. There is no swype like interface to make typing less cumbersome. Graphically intense games like speed racing are a no go on the phone.

Telephony and Phonebook

We really admire the HTC sense’s feature of integrating twitter and Facebook contacts in the phone contacts. It is really social media on the go. The phone supports both 2G and 3G interface and call quality in both the networks is decent. The loudspeaker feature of the phone does not completely muffle background noise but still the caller voice is understandable on the other end.

Messaging and Emails

Unlimited SMS memory comes with SMS, MMS, Email, and SNS features.

Gallery, Photo Viewer and Video Player

The video player only supports mp4 formats. The playback quality is not something, which the phone can boast about. The small screen further adds to the video playing woes. Photo viewer is very basic and pulls photos from the social media contacts, which is accepted in today’s phones.

HTC wildfire S Music Player and FM Radio

Music player supports MP3 and Wav formats and the playback controls are somewhat crude but still passable. Arranging music is easy. FM player is good with fast scanning and storage options. The audio quality of the phone is good. The earphones that come in the case are very good.

HTC wildfire S Camera and Image Quality

The phone has a 5MP camera with autofocus, LED flash and Zoom. However, the photos from the phone lack colour balance and are not as sharp as its counterparts. The camera has features like geo tagging and face detection. The phone does not have a secondary camera so video calling is out of question.

Video Camera and Video Quality

The phone does not play HD videos. Videos can be recorded at 24fps. When you move from light areas to dark or dark to light when recording the videos the transition is not at all smooth and the videos appear stilted.

HTC wildfire S Connectivity Options

The phone has GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB as connectivity options. The feature of Wi-Fi hotspot makes it easier to connect to networks and devices.

Organiser and Other utility Tools

Apart from HTC sense, the phone has various other features such as HTC Sync, Bookmarks, Calculator, Calendar, Clock, Friend Stream, News, People, Stocks, Weather, Downloadable Widgets, and Caller ID.

Web Browser and Applications

The phone supports JAVA as a third party application. The browser on the phone is average in performance. Zooming on the websites, you will find that the text and the pictures start to pixelate a bit. Import inbuilt apps include YouTube, Google Talk, Picasa Integration, Google Search, Gmail and HTC.

Google Maps and GPS

The phone supports A-GPS and Google maps apps is inbuilt on the phone. When the network connectivity is good, you’ll find that the phone connects to GPS quite fast. However, in low signal areas, it is quite difficult to latch onto.

Value for Money

The phone is priced at approximately INR 9000 (approx., may vary) in the Indian market. We feel that the phone is slightly high priced.

Verdict

Poor battery life and a not so good quality of screen bring down the average rating of the phone. We would like to rate the phone 3.5 out of 5.