HTC Wildfire S Review
By Blake Sanders on November 1st, 2011
The phone comes in three different colors – grey, mauve or white. The phone is 4 inches tall, 2.3 inches wide and 0.49 inches thick, weighing a total of 3.7 ounces. It is certainly a sleek and good looking piece of equipment, with a quasi-futuristic appeal to it. In line with this it also has a nice, sturdy build quality that makes it even more comfortable in the palm of your hand.
However, as always there is a drawback to having such a compact phone. The screen size is 3.2 inches with a 480x320 resolution. This isn’t something to be shunned at, but when comparing it to the growing expectations of smart phones with big screens it could disappoint some users. The major issue with the screen size is that it can give the image a strained quality in it. This is particularly true when it comes to multimedia options, web browsing or simply text and e-mail typing. Still, the phone does attempt to alleviate these issues with a pinch-to-zoom function to help when reading small text.
Whilst it may not have the hardware capabilities of recent models, it still comes with most of their features. It has quad-band world roaming in addition to Wi-Fi support. It also offers support for Bluetooth 3.0, GPS and 3G.
The phone comes with Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread, the latest version of Android’s operating system. It does come with HTC sense to give the phone the glimmering visual interface that is expected in HTC phones. However, it does not ship the latest version of Sense, so the user will miss out on some features that the more expensive smart phones come with.
In regards to the hardware, the HTC Wildfire S comes with a 600MHz processor, a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and a strikingly disappointing 512MB internal memory. This seems to be a growing trend in budget HTC phones – offering smaller internal memory but presenting the option to add up to an additional 32GB of memory via an SD card. The phone also arrives with a 2GB microSD card ready to be installed.
The camera’s picture quality is of an acceptable standard. It is, in fact, a little better than what you’d expect from a phone in this price bracket. It does come with LED flash and the camera app has options for editing pictures.
