HTC Wildfire S deals & review

The original HTC Wildfire was released in the UK last summer and met with a generally warm reception. It was seen by many as a miniature version of HTC’s extremely successful HTC Desire handset, with lower hardware specifications and a smaller screen. While the Desire was aimed squarely at the top-end market, the Wildfire with its more modest size and hardware was aimed at the budget to mid-range market and proved to be a great success.

The Wildfire S brings improvements across the board to the original Wildfire. Among other improvements, the physical dimensions of the phone have been trimmed down while maintaining the same screen size, the processor and RAM have been upgraded, and the new handset is running the latest version of Android. However, there is some concern that while the specifications have been improved, the processor in particular is still not quite up to the standards of contemporary phones and struggles with more complex applications and multitasking.

The Wildfire S benefits greatly from HTC’s excellent Sense UI and despite its underwhelming processor it delivers a very smooth experience for day-to-day activities. It also boasts a sleek design and a metal-rich construction that give it an unmistakeably premium feel. These factors make the Wildfire S a very viable offering in the budget to mid-range smartphone market and an entry level Android worthy of serious consideration.

At the time of writing, the Wildfire S is offered by all major UK networks, including Orange, T-Mobile, O2, Three and Vodafone. Thanks to its mid-range credentials, the Wildfire S is available on some very affordable contracts and so represents excellent value for money.

The HTC Wildfire is a small phone by touchscreen smartphone standards. It houses a 3.2” screen, the same size as that of the original Wildfire, though it’s even more compact than its predecessor. By omitting the trackpad at the bottom of the chassis, HTC have trimmed the height of the handset from the original’s 4.2” down to just 3.99”. The width and depth of the phone are virtually unchanged, but the Wildfire S is noticeably lighter at just 105 grams.

So the Wildfire S is small and light, but is it well built? My initial impressions were very good. HTC haven’t skimped in the materials for this phone - there’s a brushed aluminium rim around the screen and sides that feels pleasingly solid in the hand. The back cover, which pops off to reveal the battery, is a single piece of rubbery plastic with a small aluminium panel surrounding the camera and flash. The plastic back is curved and has a matte finish and soft texture. This, combined with the small size and light weight of the Wildfire S, allow it to sit pleasantly in the palm.

The overall build quality of the Wildfire S is excellent and belies the mid-range price tag attached to the handset. I delivered an enthusiastic twisting and pulling to the phone, but it was firmly put together – no cracks and no give in the construction.

Removing the back cover is achieved through slipping a fingernail into a small notch behind the power key and pulling, quite hard, until with a series of satisfying clicks the numerous catches that firmly hold the cover on give way. This generated my only real concern with the construction of the Wildfire S - the back cover is so firmly attached that I was worried I might apply too much pressure in the effort to remove it and break one of the catches. Eventually, though, the cover came loose and beneath it I discovered the battery, the micro SD slot and SIM card slot (underneath the battery).

Like most of HTC’s 2011 range, including the Desire S and Sensation, the Wildfire S eschews physical command keys in favour of four capacitive touch controls along the bottom of the screen. A sensor in the handset detects low levels of light and illuminates these four keys when necessary, and the phone vibrates slightly when they are pressed – a nice touch that provides some tactile feedback to confirm that you’ve hit the button. There are three physical buttons on the Wildfire S – a power/lock key on the top edge and volume up and down keys on the left edge. The volume keys also allow you to zoom in and out when using the camera, but unfortunately there is no dedicated shutter button.

With its sleek design and high quality materials, the HTC Wildfire S both looks and feels good. It’s also available in a range of colours including white, silver, black and purple. My review handset was a white model, which had a clean, modern look.

Despite my best and most cynical efforts, I could find little to fault in the design of the Wildfire S. Excepting my slight concern over the amount of pressure required to remove the back cover, the only negative point I found was in the positioning of the camera lens. It’s placed in top centre at the back of the phone and due to the small size of the handset I found that whichever hand I held it in, my index finger came to rest directly on top of the lens. Not a major problem, but it might cause some annoyance if you find that the perfect moment you thought you’d captured is smudged out by the jam donut you had at lunch.

The Wildfire S features a 3.2” TFT capacitive touchscreen. Its 320 x 480 resolution isn’t exactly world class but given the small screen size of the Wildfire S, the number of pixels per inch is respectable and provides for clear, if not exactly “crisp”, images and text. At the very least, the resolution of the Wildfire S is a marked improvement upon its predecessor, which had a frankly disappointing 240 x 320 resolution.

Beyond the resolution, the display of the Wildfire S performs very well. I felt that the colour delivery was worthy of particular note - colours on the Wildfire S are bright and vibrant, a fact made immediately apparent by HTC’s famously colourful default background. Viewing angles are good and the screen performs surprisingly well outdoors. I tested it in bright, sunny conditions and, though a little faint, the display remained visible and functional.

The Wildfire S’ contrast is good, for an LCD screen, though not perfect. Whites are certainly bright, but blacks are never quite black and rather are displayed as a very dark grey. This isn’t a huge issue in general use, but was very apparent when I placed the phone side by side with an AMOLED-screened phone.

The 5 megapixel camera attached to the Wildfire S is quite a competent offering, considering the relatively low price tag on the phone. HTC have kindly included a number of example shots pre-loaded onto the handset which, while very attractive, are mostly taken in locations far more exotic and spectacular than most of us will have the privilege of taking our phones to. To balance it out, I took a test shot of a more common sight: a purple wheelie bin considerately left in the centre of my drive. As you can see, the image was taken on a bright day and the Wildfire S did a decent job of coping with some stark light-shadow contrast. The colours were well captured, if a little subdued, and the 5 megapixel resolution is quite adequate for most purposes.

As you might expect, camera performance was less impressive in darker conditions. HTC have packed an excellent LED flash into the Wildfire S, which helps greatly with night time or indoor shots, but unfortunately the autofocus struggled when light was lacking.

A useful feature I discovered in the Wildfire S’ camera settings was its “Self-Portrait” mode. Unsure what to expect, I turned this feature on and was instructed to “Frame a face to capture a photo”. I turned the phone around and soon after it made a click, a whir and took a picture of my perplexed face. As I now know, this feature uses face recognition technology to determine when you have the camera pointed at yourself and then takes a picture – a very handy tool on a phone without a dedicated camera key, as searching with your thumb on a touchscreen facing away from you is never any fun.

There are two external physical connections on the Wildfire S – a 3.5 mm stereo jack for plugging in your headphones and a micro USB port at the bottom of the left edge, used for various functions including charging the phone and connecting to other devices. A pair of headphones has to be plugged into the 3.5 mm jack for HTC’s very swish looking FM radio app to function, and HTC conveniently ship the Wildfire S with a pair. The headphones they provide are OK, but not likely to replace a serious music buff’s favourite set. They do include a nice touch in the form of a little switch where the wires meet that turns the FM radio app on and off.

As mentioned previously, removing the back cover of the Wildfire S reveals a micro SD card slot at the bottom left. Ours came pre-loaded with a 2 GB card, but this is expandable up to 32 GBs. Given that the Wildfire S has just 512 MB of internal memory besides its SD card, you will very likely want to upgrade that pre-installed card, especially if you intend to build up a decent library of apps, videos and music.

The Wildfire S has a fairly comprehensive set of connectivity features. It supports connection to Wi-Fi networks (IEEE 802.11b/g/n) and I found the adapter to be very stable. For mobile internet, the Wildfire S supports 3G, GPRS and EDGE connections, though connection speeds of course vary depending upon network coverage and signal strength. There’s also Bluetooth 3.0 support for transferring files and connecting Bluetooth headsets etc.

I found the internal GPS antenna of the Wildfire S to be particularly impressive. Within a few seconds of turning on GPS and popping open the pre-installed Google Maps app, it had pinpointed my position to within 30 metres. While GPS performance will always vary depending on the area you’re using it in, this is significantly better than the performance I’ve seen in some handsets. My trusty old Orange San Francisco took a good minute to whittle my position down to a 30 metre radius – though the San Fran isn’t known for its fantastic GPS antenna!

So far, so good for the Wildfire S. Unfortunately, much of the criticism I’ve seen levelled against the Wildfire S in other reviews has pointed not to the design or features of the device, but to its hardware performance. So how does it perform under direct testing?

Firstly, let’s take a look at what’s inside. The Wildfire S is powered by a 600 MHz processor with 512 MB of RAM – not exactly stellar specifications. To put this in some context, the Samsung Galaxy S II (generally considered to be the most powerful Android smartphone available at the time of writing) has a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM. In rough and clumsy terms, that means that the industry leader has twice the RAM of the Wildfire S and 2 processors, each capable of running twice as fast.

But the proof is in the pudding. In general use, the Wildfire S doesn’t seem to suffer too much from its less than super-powered processor. Navigating around the home screens, widgets and menus is a smooth experience with little lag and the Sense UI is as much a pleasure to interact with as ever (more on this later!). However, the Wildfire S does begin to creak a little if you push it.

I downloaded Angry Birds from the Android Market (strictly for scientific purposes, of course) and found it to be perfectly playable, if a little laggy in the more complex levels. Leaving the game running in the background I loaded up Google Maps and scrolled randomly around the local area. This wasn’t quite such a smooth experience – the Wildfire S handles Google Maps perfectly on its own, but add a game to the background and it develops a slight but noticeable stutter. With both apps running in the background I booted up the web browser and the Wildfire S began to struggle. There simply isn’t enough juice in the Wildfire S’ engine to cope with any great degree of multitasking. This isn’t a crippling flaw for the handset as it’s simple enough to manage your running applications to get the best from the device but if you need a powerhouse that’s capable of running 20 apps at the same time, you might want to look elsewhere.

On a more positive note, the battery life of the Wildfire S was quite impressive. It has a 1230 mAh Lithium-ion battery that manages to happily last through 2 to 3 days of light use without too much trouble, even with Wi-Fi and GPS enabled. This is enhanced by some handy and customisable power management options in the settings menu that allow the Wildfire S to turn off and change various settings when the battery is getting low.

The Wildfire S achieved a rather lacklustre Quadrant score of 700, placing its benchmarked performance firmly amongst last year’s handsets. Its benchmark score is a little lower than the Galaxy S and a little higher than an out-of-the-box HTC Desire. That’s not at all bad company to be in, but with dual-core phones like the Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation setting Quadrant scores upwards of 2000 or even 3000 this year, the hardware inside the Wildfire S seems a little dated.

For me, usability is where the Wildfire S really shines. HTC’s ever impressive Sense UI is full of intuitive and handy tweaks and improvements to the Android OS that really make the phone a pleasure to use. Basic functions are easy and quick to perform and the phone walks you through getting everything set up. If you’re more of an advanced user, though, you’ll find that there’s a vast degree of customisation possible by investigating the settings menus.

The phone launches HTC’s Setup app the first time it’s powered up, and this app will walk you through the basics of getting your phone set up. It’s a very well designed little utility and really makes getting up and running very easy. Among other features, it’ll show you how to open the phone and insert your SIM if you haven’t already, how to set up WiFi, and even how to use the on screen keyboard. This app also allows you to directly transfer contacts and other information from a previous phone via Bluetooth, which is a very nice addition. If you don’t want to get everything set up straight away, the app can be launched at any time from the app drawer of the phone.

The Sense UI on the Wildfire S features 7 homescreens as standard, all preloaded with widgets. You can flick between the screens left and right, or a quick pinch gesture zooms out so you can pick the screen you want directly. Pre-loaded widgets include HTC’s famous weather app, a messaging app that displays your most recent SMS messages, HTC’s Friend Stream that aggregates updates from all your social networking accounts into a single stream, and of course the classic HTC clock widget. There’s also a contacts app and a fairly basic music player app pre-loaded onto the homescreens, as well as a wide variety of other HTC widgets to pick from in the settings menu.

As an Android phone, the Wildfire S naturally has access to the Android Market where you can choose from thousands of apps. Since the Wildfire S is running the latest version of Android (2.3 Gingerbread), the selection of apps isn’t limited much by compatibility issues. However, as mentioned previously, the phone does struggle with more complicated applications or games.

Once you’ve loaded up the phone with apps they go to the app drawer, accessible from the homescreens, and here I found another of the Sense UI’s handy tweaks. In stock Android, you scroll freely through your list of app icons. This is fine at first, but once you have a sizeable collection, it’s very easy to get frustrated when brushing the screen just a little too fast can send you hurtling past the app you’re looking for. HTC eliminate this by dividing the drawer into pages that are scrolled through one at a time. It’s a small touch, but it makes a big difference and this is characteristic of the little touches and improvements that the Sense UI brings to many aspects of Android.

Like all Androids, the HTC Wildfire S is highly customisable to fit your preferences, from changing the wallpapers to rearranging the widgets and homescreens. HTC have also added a useful “Scene” feature which basically allows you to pick from a selection of pre-configured set ups for things like Work, Play, Travel, etc. Though these all have a pre-defined set up, each is customisable so, for example, you can set up your “Work” and “Travel” profiles as you like them, save those settings and switch between the two.

HTC’s Sync software allows you to easily add music, video and pictures to the phone from your PC, as well as back up all of your recorded videos and pictures. The music playing widget that’s pre-loaded onto one of the default homescreens is a fairly basic affair, offering you only the option to play, pause or skip a track, but thankfully the main music app is more in-depth and organises your library according to artist and album. The external speaker of the Wildfire S is unfortunately quite ‘tinny’ and isn’t likely to impress too many people with its sound quality. On the other hand, it is probably just about loud enough to annoy a bus full of people, if that’s your kind of thing.

Email and social networking are well accounted for with another couple of HTC’s proprietary widgets – HTC Mail and Friend Stream. I found both to be very easy to set up and get running. The Friend Stream widget is worthy of particular note. It functions with both Twitter and Facebook accounts, allowing you to aggregate all of your social networking feeds into one place. I found the ability to tweet and update my status simultaneously to be a great feature.

Finally we come to the most essential question of all – does it perform well as a phone? Well, overall, yes, it does. Phone calls are handled excellently by the Wildfire S and I found the quality of the audio within calls to be pleasingly crisp and clear, with both speakers and microphone performing well. In-call volume can be adjusted from a whisper to a volume that I found almost uncomfortable but which would doubtless be useful for noisy environments. The speakerphone function performs equally well and though the sound produced by the main speakers is a little ‘tinny’, crucially it is loud enough and the microphone is sensitive enough.

Text messaging with the Wildfire S is more of a mixed bag. HTC’s on-screen keyboard is very nicely laid out and the phone vibrates slightly when a key is pushed, providing tactile feedback just as with the capacitive buttons along the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately the capacitive buttons caused me a bit of an issue. When using the keyboard in portrait mode and typing with one hand, it was very easy to brush either the back or the settings button when reaching for the space bar. This doesn’t cause you to lose the text message that you’re writing, but it does break up your flow and is quite irritating. The capacitive buttons are much harder to accidentally hit in landscape mode, but if you type particularly quickly you may find that the Wildfire S occasionally misses a letter or two – an unfortunate consequence of the sub-par processor of in the phone. Overall, the Wildfire S handles messaging acceptably, if not quite excellently.

Samsung Galaxy Ace - A similarly priced budget handset from Samsung, the Galaxy Ace features a larger screen than the Wildfire S at 3.5” and a faster processor at 800 MHz. The trade-off for this is that the Ace contains less RAM (256 MB), ships with the older Android 2.2 and doesn’t have the benefit of the HTC Sense UI.

Orange San Francisco - A popular budget handset from manufactured by ZTE and marketed by Orange, the San Francisco features similar processor and RAM to the Wildfire S and a larger 3.5” AMOLED screen, though comes with the much older Android 2.1 operating system.

Samsung Galaxy Mini - The smallest of Samsung’s current range of Androids features a 3.14” touchscreen and the same 600 MHz processor as the Wildfire S.

LG Optimus Black - A more expensive but still quite affordable mid-range handset that features a 1 GHz processor and a large 4” screen employing LG’s NOVA Display technology.

The Wildfire S is the follow up handset to HTC´s popular Wildfire. The Wildfire was a scaled down and more affordable version of the flagship Desire. The Wildfire S does not cut back on messaging or entertainment features as most of the affordability is acquired through a slightly slower processor and smaller screen than the Desire.

At 3.2" the Wildfire S´s screen is more petite than most touchscreens on the market today and this instantly gives it appeal to people who find the larger handsets too uncomfortably large. The screen is a capacitive TFT affair with 256k colours and a relatively sharp resolution of 320 x 480. An accelerometer is included which can be used for auto-rotating the interface amongst other features.

The Wildfire S runs on the latest version of Android on release, with Android 2.3 Gingerbread being put to good use with HTC´s Sense UI. The main cost saving achieved by the Wildfire S seem to come from packing a slightly slower 600MHz processor compared to its Desire sibling, which means that the Wildfire S is not quite as high powered but still packs a punch in performance.

Wi-Fi and 3G connections have not been removed to increase affordability, and as such the Wildfire is truly an excellent messaging handset. It comes with threaded SMS available, as well as MMS, email and instant messaging clients. As an Android handset the Wildfire S comes with excellent support for Gmail and Google Talk in particular. For other messaging purposes there is excellent social networking support for the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

The Wildfire S comes with great playback support for music and video with 32GB of storage available through microSD cards. There is also a YouTube app allowing you to stream videos from the popular video website, and Picasa integration allowing you to quickly upload photos captured on the 5 megapixel camera. This camera comes with an LED flash, geo-tagging and video recording available.

The Wildfire S is an excellent Android handset that ticks all the right boxes for entertainment and messaging. It comes with fantastic social networking support, which is greatly enhanced by the 3G and Wi-Fi connections available. These are features that are usually dropped when it comes to making phones more affordable which is why it is nice to find them on the Wildfire S, whose affordability appears to stem primarily from a reduced processor speed.