Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with pocketnow.com today I've got the HTC Wildfire s to show you it's a really really cool little phone and I think you're gonna like it let's go ahead and get this in the unboxed okay so before we get started a big shout out to t-mobile for providing us with this review unit 2 to test and to show you it's very very cool as such the the stuff that we're gonna tell you is our own so don't worry about t-mobile trying to influence us other than than providing us with a specification sheet everything that you're gonna see here is purely us so let's go ahead and get this thing open and take a look at it first of all we've got a very nice lift up box nice design here very good-looking phone over on the side we've got some branding we've got some what's inside over here on the back some very quick specifications and a whole bunch of fryin print like you're used to and down on the bottom just t-mobile branding on the other side of that box is a sticker with IMEI information so let's get this open now there's the phone nice and pretty set that aside for a minute and see what else we have in the box of course we've got a nice white colored HTC wall wart with u.s. prongs and a USB port on the other side just like we've become accustomed to it does have a matching in this case white USB cable with the the nice rounded white edges and corners I really really like that it's just an extra level of finesse on it even a white little rubber band there now this is white because the phone is white the phone is also available through select distributors in black as well so when it's not your thing you can do that I'll show you that in just a minute and I think you'll kind of like it so inside this little box we don't have to open the lid or anything there they just kind of slide out is our return label so you can take your old phone put it in the box slap a label on it send it back for recycling or repurposing this is something that t-mobile does that I really like next we've got a start guide formerly known as the QuickStart Gide but tells you a whole bunch of stuff one thing that it doesn't tell you okay so look through this really quick yada yada yada right here tells you about the SIM card detach the sim from the bigger card okay good enough pull the back cover away from the phone and remove the battery that's it step two is very ambiguous and you'll see what I mean in in just a minute kind of crazy but remember that step two yeah pull it off okay and last of course we've got the terms and conditions return policy limited warranty in multi languages okay you guys didn't want to see all that in that much detail so let's get onto the phone this is the phone now the first thing you're going to notice there's the Wildfire here's my g2 this this is a ridiculously small phone it's teeny looking at it on edge you can see it's about half the thickness of the g2 about the same with a little bit narrower but the big thing there is just the overall length just a huge amount of space has been eliminated from this device of course the the Wildfire s does not have a keyboard like the g2 does but it's not supposed to so what does it have let's take a look of course you've got your nice very reflective screen on front you've got nice capacitive buttons on front but there is an absence of a trackpad or a trackball you'll notice that first and foremost that means if you want to have fine precision control over your pointer you're gonna have to have a keyboard that has the arrows on the bottom of it now or just be really good with your fingers I've got big fat fingers so it's hard to get precision that's why I like my trackball I don't think that's going to be a problem let's keep moving on here so down at the bottom you'll notice we've got our menus it's in the same order as on the g2 which is very very good I hate it when devices switch around the menu items you notice they've gone with the new kind of stylized buttons they're pretty much the same menu on mine says menu this one is just the three lines in the past that used to be a longer line with too little in lines underneath it to infer that it was a menu now as a house without any eaves whereas my has eaves and a chimney isn't that quaint so moving back to the Wildfire s we've got t-mobile branding on the bottom we've got HTC branding on the top we've got our microphone excuse me our speakers up here on the top moving around to the top of the device we've got our multi-use headphone jack a little notch there that assists in taking off the back of the phone remember I told you about that yeah we'll get to that in just a second and then our power button over on the side we don't have a dedicated camera button at all over there kind of interesting down on the bottom we've got our speaker or shooter on our microphone holes over on this side we've got a micro USB and our volume rocker which feels really really good I might add now while we're here let me go ahead and plug in the micro USB just so you can see how that fits it's a very nice fit really snug when I get into it all the way it feels really really good so I'm quite impressed with it over on the back we've got our camera now let's get into some details about the camera because everybody's interested about that first it does not have a front-facing camera just a rear-facing camera and that rear-facing camera is it's really pretty good it's a 5 megapixel camera it's got a 3x digital zoom on it and you guys know I don't really like digital zooms all that much it does have that LED flash autofocus the camera app that it comes with has face detection and very shooting modes you're familiar with the HTC camera so we won't go into too much detail there we've got our rear speaker back there on the back very simple branding HTC with HTC Sense this is running Android 2.3.3 so not quite the latest version of the OS but it it's running since 2.1 so that's a little bit dated now so kind of interesting there now i'm going to try and get into this back panel see if i can do it remember step two that said just take the back off not as easy as you might think you've really got a it's tough alright guys take my word on that so let me go off camera and get my little tool here and we'll be right back alright so once you've gotten this initial separation done and I would recommend using a plastic case tool to do that with which you know what most people don't have so if you're gonna get this phone make sure they do everything you need to at the store where they've got those tools but once you've got that separated just run your finger along the seam and it separates it nice and then you can easily lift the phone out now that's where things get interesting you'll notice down here there's actually a recess that the phone fits down inside just like that this is the first phone that I've seen that's done something like that and it's really really a nice way to go it holds the phone securely and it also gives an option for not only the manufacturer but others to make third-party accessories for example if you wanted to change this to blue if there's somebody out there that makes it a blue case wrap for it you can just do that pop it in snap it in place and now you've got a blue phone versus the white one that you have now now I did mention that black is available through select distributors so if you want black instead of white you can do that stock or hopefully hang out and see if there are some replacement options out there for you but very nice and it holds on very snug it's them a metaphor that I like really well having met that little lip that sticks down in there one other thing you'll notice in classic Android style and it has a little uplift to it so you've got the Android chin right there kind of cool but let's get back to the phone so down here we've got our battery let's go ahead and take that out and take a look at it it's an HTC branded battery and if we look at this it's got a 1230 milliamp hour capacity so not huge but for such a small device it should be just fine plenty fine in fact a little bit larger than most the sim card that's in this way to get it in and out you simply slide up and that unlocks it and then if I had better fingernails I I would be able to to lift this out there we go just like that and then simps out just like that put that back in and lock it back in place down here you've got your SD card now this is not a push to eject this is just a pull it comes with a Samsung 2gig micro SDHC card or micro SD card rather to get it back in you just push it in and you don't have to worry about it locking in place because it just slides in place now that is not accessible from outside the device which most SD cards aren't anymore so if you want to get at it you're gonna have to take the case off and I would also recommend taking the battery out just because the way we use our SD cards today as app storage and whatnot so that's the the device it goes back together very very easily put that back together put that back together and overall a very nice very small phone that I like quite a bit how small 3.2 inch diagonal so it's a really small screen but it fits really really well in hand it feels comfortable it feels nice it fits perfectly with the contours right back here you've got the rounded back so I like it quite a bit now this is just the hardware side of the review because honestly it went a little bit long and showing you all the details I'm trying to get that back panel off make sure you tune in for our software portion of the review we're gonna do some some benchmarks and some tests we're probably going to skip the first boot because it's HTC Sense 2.1 which you've seen before so very very common common first boot sequence we may still end up doing that but make sure you subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already so that you can make sure you know when that comes out if you haven't told your friends about this giving the video a thumbs up is a good way to do that because it shares your your likes and really your dislikes with with your friends and the people that are following you on YouTube and various social networking sites so make sure you do that as well and of course we're going to use this primarily as my daily driver for the next few days here and we're gonna do a thorough review on it here coming up very quickly so make sure you have got pocketnow.com on your bookmark so you can come back and see that full review as soon as it is out showing off the HTC Wildfire s for to mobile for pocketnow.com I'm Joe Levi