HTC has just announced that its newest handset – the Wildfire – will go on sale in Europe and Asia from Q3 2010 and is aimed at a younger market while providing HTC’s slick Sense interface.
The Wildfire has a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, a five-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash, a 3.5-mm audio jack and micro SD card slot, but stacking it up against its big brother, the Desire, it lacks the 3.7-inch AMOLED screen and 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
The Wildfire, however, does have all the good bits about HTC’s Android handsets. It has the Sense overlay, the Friend Stream app for pushing Twitter, Flickr and Facebook updates to the home screen, and the threaded messaging, pulling in all recent texts, phone calls, emails and social media updates from one contact into one place.
“Today’s social networks provide an essential forum for friendship with more than 400 million users – many of whom are young adults – actively sharing their lives with their friends through Facebook,” said Florian Seiche, vice-president, HTC EMEA.
“HTC Wildfire makes the HTC Sense experience available to young mobile users for the first time. It brings all your communications into one place, whether it’s through Facebook, Twitter, text messages, images or email, ensuring that you are never far away from the conversation and always close to your friends.”
Incidentally, the Wildfire was named after a Facebook poll helped HTC decide what customers wanted. One of the names that didn’t get picked was the HTC Jovi. As in Jon Bon Jovi. Why? It did get 17pc of all votes, though.
By Marie Boran
Photo: The HTC Wildfire
