HTC Wildfire

  HTC Wildfire Price: $349.00

The HTC Widfire has present at birth something from all its cousins – it’s the same size and shape as the Tattoo, yet has the Desire’s classy matt feel. However, while the Desire was clad in Teflon, the Wildfire is constructed from metalized plastic with a soft sheen. It’s wider and shorter than the Legend, offering a more comfortable experience when typing on the touch-screen keyboard. Using the optical track pad allows the user to navigate without touching the display. Above it sit four touch-sensitive areas for home, back, search and menu.

Android fans are usually a bit geeky, thanks to the opportunities that it offers for tweaking. However, HTC is doing its best to push Android to the masses, with an offering of easy-to-use handsets, customized with the HTC Sense interface. The Wildfire sits somewhere in the middle of the group – cheaper than the Desire and Legend, but a touch slicker than the Tattoo. In terms of hardware, it’s more akin to the older HTC Hero, but its range of software ensures it sits firmly among the ranks of the latest smartphones.

Just like the Legend and Desire, the HTC Wildfire runs on Android 2.1, with the updated Sense interface from HTC. Offering support for multi-touch, you can pinch and zoom in any home screen to allow for viewing in helicopter mode, and you’ll find all the HTC widgets here, including Friend torrent for social networkers. The only thing that betrays the Wildfire’s low price is the pixilated QVGA display. The Wildfire also has a five-megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash. But there’s no dedicated camera button – you have to use the optical track pad. The camera produced somewhat

soft images, even in daylight, but you’ll find the colors are warm and true.