The HTC Wildfire has just popped onto the Vodafone website and is available right now. Cost? Well, you’re looking at a mere £20 per month on a 24 month plan. T-Mobile are doing exactly the same deal, albeit with more minutes per month chucked in. 3UK will be doing it too, but it doesn’t seem to be available as yet.
Now, we’ll give you a bit of a treat. A full review is coming up soon on the Wildfire but we gave a HTC Wildfire to a complete newbie – someone who’s never played with a HTC device and had no clue about the Android OS or the HTC Sense interface. What would he think of it? Click on, because we’re publishing some of his thoughts below, then you can decide whether to head to a Vodafone / T-Mobile store in the morning.
Links – Vodafone – T-Mobile
“As a complete novice to the HTC range in its current public image, and even more so the Android operating system having only ever owned a Nokia before it was exciting to open up the Wildfire from scratch and see how all this hype measured up for me.
Having the rare opportunity of opening the HTC Wildfire, I was initially very impressed with the look and feel; thin, light and clean. On powering on, instantly presented with a wizard which to be honest I was not expecting and a little annoyed couldnt get out of but then guess thats just because of the urge to play straight away. Although on reflection its a good idea as it gets the setup out of the way. During the setup as there was no sim card inserted it would not let me pass until it had joined a WiFi network, imagine if I couldnt join a network if one was available, meaning I couldn’t play till this was configured.
However once passed all this, wow! I am genuinely impressed as a base phone and so no apps it holds a good image, fast to move about. Usual interface with the sense, fast flowing movemements as you move through the phone, already think its better than the Nokia menu interface.
I didn’t have a clue how to install or get applications. I think the first thing to do is get used to this new keyboard, what a change. My Nokia 5800 xpressmusic is a touch screen and with T9 proves very fast for typing, of course criteria is good spelling.
It turned out that apps very easy to get through the Android Market. There’s a very good selection both free and paid, arranged in their categories making general browsing enjoyable. I can also search such as Sky Remote Record returned a few results, paid and free versions.”
More to come in the full review. Stay tuned!