HTC Wildfire S review

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.