HTC Wildfire S review

The new Wildfire S is 6mm shorter and weighs 13g less than the Wildfire it replaces. Its screen has the same 3.2in diagonal, but its 320×480 resolution is an improvement on the previous model’s 240×320 pixels. We can’t help but feel the looks have taken a step backwards, though, due to the tacky chrome strip around the screen and the removal of the handy directional optical pad. The phone’s shorter body also makes it trickier to hold in one hand and use with your thumb – it feels slightly cramped.

There’s no doubt that the specifications of the S have been improved. For a start, you get Android 2.3 rather than 2.1, so along with noticeable improvements in speed, you get improved text selection, battery management and the ability to place SIP calls, amongst other things. The processor is also a faster 600MHz model, up from the 528MHz chip in the old phone, and there’s now 512MB of RAM rather than 384MB.

However, we noticed the S only has 150MB of space left for apps, and as it ships, 28MB of this is already taken up. This leaves very little room for further programs. As not all apps can be moved to the SD card, you’ll soon find yourself running out of room. This compares unfavourably with phones such as Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc, which has around 380MB of free app space.

Even though the phone’s screen has a higher resolution than the original Wildfire’s, the colour depth has dropped from 16M to 256K shades. We didn’t notice much degradation in display quality, probably because the increased resolution makes up for the reduced colour depth. Images are far crisper than on the original Wildfire, and there’s no pixellation in fine text.

HTC’s Sense has had an upgrade too, and aims to be cleverer than before. For example, it increases the ring volume when it senses that the phone is inside a bag, and you can flip the phone over on its face to mute incoming calls. There’s a new Power Saver option that you can set to disable features such as Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth automatically when the battery falls below a customisable level, and a new Fast Boot feature reduces boot time from 50s to 5s – as long as you haven’t taken the battery out.

The FM Radio supports RDS, and when you first turn it on, it will scan for radio stations, although you’ll need to plug in your headphones to act as an aerial. HTC’s music app replaces the standard Android app, but doesn’t seem to add any extra functions. It also seemed to have problems picking up album art from our MP3s. Unlike other Android phones, the Wildfire S doesn’t come with a music store such as Amazon’s, although you can download this from the Market.

Unlike the standard Android Gallery, HTC’s Sense version doesn’t let you browse photos in a 3D wall – instead, you are presented with a list of albums, and there’s no way to create new albums or move photos between albums. Two extra tabs at the bottom let you access your Facebook and Flickr friends and see their photos, but again these are displayed by album, with each album showing a flat wall of photos, and there aren’t any management functions, such as downloading or organising photos. All you can do is share links to your friends’ photos or add comments. The Videos app is actually a subset of the Gallery devoted to videos, and as such it has the same limitations.

Android is as much about the apps you can download as the apps that come installed – if not more so – so it was slightly annoying to find that HTC had replaced the “My Apps” icon in the Market with an HTC icon, which takes you to a selection of recommended apps. These are all paid apps, and in our opinion didn’t represent a good cross-section of apps, but seemed to be driven more by marketing than customer need. You can still access your installed apps through a menu option.

Where Sense does work well is in the People app, which aggregates all your contacts from your Google account, Facebook, Twitter and Exchange, plus any other accounts that you add via third-party apps (such as last.fm and LinkedIn). Sense looks for duplicate contacts and offers to link them, so you can have details about the same contact from different services in one place. As you add new services, notifications will pop up suggesting new links, and you can also link contacts manually, which is useful when friends get married and change their surname.

While it’s an upgrade on paper, the new Wildfire S doesn’t look as smart as the original, and we weren’t sure about some of HTC’s custom installed software. It also suffers in comparison with the Motorola DEFY, which has a larger, higher resolution screen, and is the same price on contract. The Defy only runs Android 2.2, but a 2.3 upgrade is rumoured to be on the way – an official Orange version was leaked on May 17th, so the official update should be here soon.