subject: Affordable Htc Desire Dressed As The Htc Wildfire [print this page] You can only go far selling high end smartphones and eventually the limited upscale market gets saturated. This has prompted the Big Five to bring smartphone wizardry to the wider budget-conscious crowds. Taiwan"s world leader in non-Symbian smartphones HTC joins the fray with an upscalish HTC Wildfire at entry level smartphone prices.
Considered by many as a "mini-Desire" the new Android 2.1 clair handset buttresses HTC"s competitive posture in the smartphone markets that have been seeing increasingly more budget smartphones with high end features like the Nokia C6. This may look like the start of a price war among smartphone makers.
It doesn"t help that Vodafone, T-mobile, 3 and Virgin Mobile will be competing for local markets with a free offer starting at "'20/month on a 24 month deal.
Dressed Down Desire
Bringing the HTC Desire to a more pedestrian level means downscaling a few features to bring its price down. But the nice thing about downscaling some of the mighty attributes of the Desire is that the downscaled phone still ends up a notch above the rest. For instance, its 3.5-inch AMOLED display with Wide-VGA (800 x 480) resolution when scaled down ends up as a 3.2-inch TFT LCD display with QVGA (320 x 240) resolution.
That"s what the HTC Wildfire has, you still get capacitive touchscreen and multitouch technologies with the same gravity accelerometer and proximity sensor, that"s not bad at all.
A smaller screen size also means a smaller body. This downsizing is most welcome to people who prefer things in smaller and lighter packages. Measuring a more compact 106.8 x 60.4 x 12 mm, the HTC Wildfire also lost 17g for a more pocket-friendly 118g.
The more compact body houses a less muscled engine, though. The Desire"s Snapdragon prowess gets nearly halved with a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM 7225 processor. With a 348 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM, its user memory onboard gets minimal but that doesn"t matter when you have a microSD slot for external memory expansion for up to 32 GB.
With a downscaled feature set, it is able to bring its 1300 mAh Li-Ion battery to deliver a generous 7.3 hours of talk time on 2G, 8 hours on 3G and a standby time of up to 690 hours on 3G.
Desire Features
Imaging benefits from the same 5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, smile detection and geo tagging as that on the Desire. Multimedia is likewise identical with the same stereo FM receiver with RDS and the media content playback for music files in the popular audio and video file formats. Its 3.5mm headphone jack and A2DP profile support allow stereo listening in either wires or wireless options.
The HTC Wildfire enjoys the same wealth of connectivity options starting with its quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE radio on 2g and dual band UMTS/HSDDPA on 3G. You also get YouTube 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, microUSB 2.0 and a GPS receiver
Positioned as a social networking phone, it gets preloaded with apps to integrate with Twitter and Facebook as well as media sharing sites YouTube, Picasa and Flickr. You get the same enhanced HTC Sense UI on top of its Android 2.1 clair OS that supports IM with Google Talk, Gmail and push email. GP
