IT Pro Verdict
The HTC Wildfire brings the looks of the Desire, with a budget twist. It runs perfectly well on Android 2.1 and battery life is ample. However, the screen is the Wildfire’s biggest failure and if you do stare at text all day, you may find that you have to step up a notch to the HTC Desire or even Legend.
There's no denying that the HTC Desire is probably HTC's best Android phone yet, if not the best Android phone available on the market.
Now HTC has released a more budget device based on the Desire that should be just as successful for those who don't have as much money to burn.
The HTC Wildfire looks almost identical to the Desire, albeit a little smaller with a different key layout.
Both feature a tiny lip at the bottom, although it's nowhere near as prominent as the Legend's or the Hero's.
Beneath the smaller 3.2in screen, there are touch sensitive control keys that substitute the Desire's hardware home, menu, back and search keys.
Below this, there's that wonderful optical navigation key that allows you to seamlessly navigate around the Wildfire.
So where have the corners been cut? Well, the first obvious place is on the screen. It's not AMOLED like on the Desire, and this is noticeable. It doesn't have the same bright, crisp finish and with a lower resolution (240x320 pixels compared to 480x800 pixels), it can sometimes feel a little pixelated, especially when viewing text.
The smaller size also makes the native HTC browser a little trickier to use, even when pinching to zoom. What does help though is the intuitive double tap to zoom into text and the translate and search tools that allow you to translate text using Google Translate or search for a term in Wikipedia within the browser itself.
Oh well, at least there's Flash Lite packed in for limited Flash support.
HTC has introduced a nifty function on the HTC Wildfire that no other HTC Android device has. It's called App sharing and allows you to share the applications you've downloaded onto your phone with colleagues or friends.
