The Shackled Muse

At first glance, the HTC Wildfire can be mistaken for the Desire and sports many of the same features – including the powerful Android 2.1 Eclair with HTC Sense. Other similarities include the touch buttons and the optical trackpad, as well as fashionable design of the device itself. In a nutshell, the Wildfire promises to be a more affordable, entry level version of it predecessors, the Desire and Legend.

When designing a budget smartphone affordable to the masses, however, something has got to give. The processing speed is slightly disappointing, causing some applications to slow down, or force close. Another notable difference is the screen. It sports a LED screen, and even though there is nothing really wrong with the size of the touch screen, the 320 x 240 resolution is slightly disappointing.

The 7 home screens provide more than enough space for all your shortcuts, widgets and applications, without being cluttered. Pressing the Home button situated on the far left below the screen activates the Leap View function, allowing you to see thumbnails of all 7 screens at once. Of course, you can customize your home screens however you see fit, either using the pre-designed templates, or starting from scratch with the Clean Slate template.

As a social media tool, the Wildfire surely measures up to all the expectations set by our ever increasing need for online interaction. Friendstream provides me with my daily fix (or two, or four) of social networking as it collects all your updates from Facebook, Twitter and what ever else tickles your fancy, and brings everything together in one tidy application.

The Android Market has a plethora of applications available, ranging from a very user friendly and easy on the eye Facebook Application to PDF Readers, Games to Office Tools and GPS navigation. A few small annoyances are some minor bugs and software gremlins; these might cause the application to force close or your phone to switch off altogether. Luckily the Market has a handy feature which allows you to see similar apps, and reading the comments left by users will give you a basic idea of its functionality. Unfortunately I’m constantly faced with the "running low on storage" reminder, and its hard to believe that I’ve already used up the 384 MB internal memory. And for this very reason, Micro SD cards exist.

I have absolutely no problem with the 3G HSPA internet access and extremely fast download speeds. The Wildfire will use the fastest connection available, therefore I mainly connect via Wi-Fi, and this offers even less difficulty than my laptop gives me.

Of course, my favourite part of any phone has to be the camera. The Wildfire sports a 5MP lens, and the quality is almost as good as my digital camera. I also get to share my photo’s, by uploading them to Facebook, Flickr, Evernote, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Geo tagging can be activated and it is fairly easy to change the settings when you need to compensate for different lighting conditions. The flash is powerful enough to take crisp clear images in utter darkness.

Surprisingly, the battery lasts close to two days on one charge. That is quite impressive if you keep in mind how much I use it.

All the little grievances aside, the Wildfire surely lives up to its name and provides value for money, especially when you consider it was designed to be a budget option to the HTC Desire.