The HTC Wildfire is an excellent buy as a knockabout work phone or maybe a teenager's first smartphone. Source: Supplied
-
HTC Wildfire, smartphone
Price: $349 on a Telstra pre-paid plan
Good for: Social networking, emailing, browsing
Includes: Camera flash, GPS, Bluetooth
Dimensions: 60x12x103mm
Rating: 9/10
IF HTC's Wildfire were a person it would wear a blue singlet and sweat hard for a living.
The low-budget, Android-powered Wildfire is made for hard yakka -- not playing games or watching HD movies.
To keep the price down, the Wildfire sports a low-resolution, 3.2 inch, 240 by 320 pixel capacitive touch screen and a low-grunt 528 MHz Qualcomm processor mated to 384 MB of system memory. Storage is via micro SD card and there's a 2GB one included.
The low-res screen doesn't look anywhere near as pretty as the screen on an iPhone 4 or HTC Desire but it's plenty good enough for social networking, emailing, web browsing and running productivity apps.
Just don't expect it to zap through the latest 3D games on the Android App Market.
Video recording and playback are somewhat stuttery.
Despite the downmarket screen and processor, the capacitive touch action is excellent and the phone is very responsive, thanks in part to running the recent 2.1 version of the Android operating system which also means that you get pinch to zoom page resizing.
While it's cheap at $349 outright on a Telstra pre-paid plan, the Wildfire has all the essentials of a full-function smartphone including GPS, a 3.5mm audio jack, Bluetooth, a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash (this doubles as a handy flashlight), Wi-FI b/g and an FM radio.
Dimensions are a very handy 60mm by 12mm by 103mm and the satin-backed case looks anything but cheap.
The phone will get through a day of moderately hard use on its battery.
The HTC Wildfire is an excellent buy as a knockabout work phone that won't break the bank or maybe as a first smartphone for a teenager on a lean and manageable pre-paid plan.
