HTC wildfire review | 5 must have Wildfire applications | Complete guide to HTC wildfire

A week before I bought HTC wildfire which is an entry level android smartphone. It sports quite a punch when compared to its competition and has a lot of features to keep you busy. I am doing an honest review so that you can make a choice when it comes to the end.

HTC wildfire is dubbed as the love child of Nexus one and HTC desire or Mini Desire. In some terms, it seems to be true. Its the successor to HTC tattoo and its a worthy one. The finishing is impeccable and much more professional so is the design as compared to tattoo. The phone is sturdily build however the screen is smudge prone. The phone has ARM6 528 Mhz processor on board with 384 MB ram. Its good for light weight gaming but is unable to render 3d games and play high def videos. The phone lags in its default HTC sense UI hence you are recommended to use some professional UI launchers like Go Launcher EX, Launcherpro and ADW. Bet the lag is attributed to CPU. Make sure your applications are compatible to them as my HTC music player crashed a lot more when I installed Launcher pro. Wildfire shines in the connectivity department.

Everything is tightly integrated with social networking in mind. You can add contact, link it to facebook profile, email, twitter..and the best thing it supports real time status updates when someone calls you. Nice touch. Internet is smooth, however, again, the default browser is slow as compared to Opera Mini and skyfire browsers. The touch is nice, when compared to Samsung offerings and LG optimus one, the touch is much better and much responsive. The Wifi-GPS-Bluetooth bundle is good and I tested Google latitude over it which gave me quite accurate results. I do have problems with keypad, but then, i installed swype and the problem was gone. Camera is a 5 MP with flash and can take good-outdoor-bad-indoor pics, there is no protective cover but over all the flash and smile detection makes the day. The accelerometer is a bit slow when it comes to rotation but again, i will attribute it to the slow cpu. Overall, its a nice phone for an android starter and offers the best bang for your buck.

The phone has Froyo 2.2.1 and is unable to be rooted at the moment. Hence I am unable to provide you how it can be optimized when rooted and how it performs as a rooted toy. I am waiting for the next Unevoked/superoneclickroot update so that i can finally squeeze the juice out of my phone.

I do tested some penetration testing applications on it and you can read my post regarding them here.

Pros

• Better touch
• 384 MB ram
• 5 MP camera with flash
• Excellent connectivity,A must have for social-networking enthusiastic
• Overall a Good bundle

Cons

• Pricier as compared to the competition
• low res screen
• Could have had a much better cpu

 

An average android phone is incomplete without applications, I recommend these apps as a must have -

• Launcher Pro – If you want to make your UI super smooth, this is the way to go.
• GO SMS – the best sms application, even better than chomp sms.
• SWYPE – tired of cramped keypad ? Try swype and all your worries will be gone.
• Opera Mini – the best cellphone bnrowser out there, if you want flash support, you can go with Dolphin and Skyfire though.
• Bar Code scanner – A must have for every android phone. Get anyone from android app market.

 

My recco – buy it if you are tight on budget, its better than its counterparts if you are not into gaming and watching videos on your cellphones.