HTC Wildfire S review

Android is as much about the apps you can download as the apps that come installed – if not more so – so it was slightly annoying to find that HTC had replaced the “My Apps” icon in the Market with an HTC icon, which takes you to a selection of recommended apps. These are all paid apps, and in our opinion didn’t represent a good cross-section of apps, but seemed to be driven more by marketing than customer need. You can still access your installed apps through a menu option.

Where Sense does work well is in the People app, which aggregates all your contacts from your Google account, Facebook, Twitter and Exchange, plus any other accounts that you add via third-party apps (such as last.fm and LinkedIn). Sense looks for duplicate contacts and offers to link them, so you can have details about the same contact from different services in one place. As you add new services, notifications will pop up suggesting new links, and you can also link contacts manually, which is useful when friends get married and change their surname.

While it’s an upgrade on paper, the new Wildfire S doesn’t look as smart as the original, and we weren’t sure about some of HTC’s custom installed software. It also suffers in comparison with the Motorola DEFY, which has a larger, higher resolution screen, and is the same price on contract. The Defy only runs Android 2.2, but a 2.3 upgrade is rumoured to be on the way – an official Orange version was leaked on May 17th, so the official update should be here soon.