31 March 2011

HTC Wildfire on 3 - Review

Pros


  • Android - awesome operating system with a lot of features
  • 30,000+ apps on the Android App Market
  • Small, compact, lightweight
  • Decent screen resolution, improved font display with the 2.2 update
  • Reasonable 5MP camera, very bright flash. Doesn't take the best pictures but are good enough for a small phone like this
  • HTC Sync software is easy enough to use
  • Nice Facebook integration to your contacts (sometimes requires manual updates)
  • The apps do a lot of talking here, there are countless things you can do with it, some coming pre-installed
  • External volume controls when locked
  • Easy-to-use interface and options
  • Support for up to 32GB SD
  • Has lived through a few accidental drops and no harm seems to be done
  • 2.2 update includes ability to install apps on your SD card


Cons


  • Seemingly slow compared to other HTC models - because of the 512MHz processor and 500MB RAM instead of the 1GB for both in other HTC models
  • Slowness affects: opening apps, navigating, browsing the internet, deleting messages (may take about 2 or 3 minutes to delete 50+ messages)
  • 3 Network coverage is very bad in some areas, customer service is not very good, they are very slow at getting HTC to release software updates for Android, some call cut outs which I never had on Tesco
  • Requires charging quite regularly if you're using it - power is mainly drained by the display and the Wifi
  • Landscape message typing is a little buggy with using backspace, and you can't select the text where the character count is
  • Method of returning to an underlying screen is not very clear, usually have to press Menu and cancel the menu to escape from typing mode
  • Cannot block specific numbers (limited by Android)
  • No Internet Connection Sharing (tethering your phone to your computer)
  • Some apps run slowly and you will probably want a Task Manger (e.g. TaskKill) to manage your running applications so you don't run out of memory
  • On a couple of occasions I haven't been able to unlock my phone while it is ringing