Tuesday I was invited for the local HTC Wildfire launch event on Circuit Park Zandvoort, and in this article I will provide a short hardware preview of this latest Android device of HTC.

2.  Hardware design HTC Wildfire

The picture above shows the HTC Wildfire in the colors white and mocca brown side-by-side. Let’s start on the upper part, where you can see the front speaker just above the silver HTC logo.

The 3.2″ capacitive touch screen with a 240 x 320  QVGA resolution takes most of the fron surface. The capacitive screen featrues the pinch-to-zoom capability, which is very helpful to zoom in.

Furthermore I’m happy to see the return of a capacitive touchscreen on a middle end device like the HTC Wildfire. You probably remember the HTC Tattoo, which featured a resitive touch screen, however the touch experience wasn’t as good as on the HTC Dream, the first Android powered device from HTC.

Slightly below the screen there are four touch buttons: (1) Home, (2) Menu, (3) Back, and (4) Search. This is an implementation I have seen on the HTC HD Mini as well, no physical buttons anymore on the front of the device.

Finally you can see the optical trackball in the bottom area of the device. Remarkably you don’t see the famous “chin”-design here.

The picture above shows the right side-view of the HTC Wildfire. As you can see there are no buttons or ports on this side of the device.

The surface of the bottom view is clean as well, without any port or buttons. I would expect the micros-USB port here, but HTC has moved this port to another surface.

So unfortunately there isn’t much exciting to share about this side-view !

In the picture above you can see a picture of the left side-view of the HTC Wildfire.

On the left in the picture you can see the hardware buttons to controle the volume of the HTC Wildfire. I like this implementation of these hardware buttons, since you can adjust the volume, even when you are on a phone call.

Furthermore you can see that the microUSB sync and charge port has moved to the left side of the HTC Wildfire. A little comperable with the HTC Snap, and this is really exciting for the development of some accessoiries, like car holders for example. However Brodit found a clever solution with a small cable for the HTC Snap Active Holders.

Just like on the HTC HD Mini you can see a similar design of the top view of the HTC Wildfire.

On the right side you can see a 3.5 mm. jack which has become the standard now on smartphones. As a result you can use your own, sometimes expensive headphones. I still really enjoy the AIAIAI Y-COM in ear headphones.

On the HTC HD Mini you could see the return of the dedicated power button. Applause for HTC, since I used this a lot in the past. On a Windows Mobile Standard device you have almost full control over your Windows Phone via the quick list, which is mapped to the power button.

The picture above shows you the similar backside of the mocca brown and white HTC Wildfire devices.

In the upper ares you can see in the center the lens of a 5 megapixel color camera with auto focus, flash and supports geotagging. Just right from the camera lens you can see the LED flash (light). On the left from the camera lens you can see a slit that hides the streo speaker on the backside of the HTC Wildfire.

Below the camera you can see a nice and large HTC logo, and the battery cover features a similar design as on the HTC HD2. Finally you can see the text “with HTC Sense” in the bottom area of the backside.

3.  Some software highlights on the HTC Wildfire

Let me start with the fact that the HTC Wildfire is powered by Google Android 2.1 (Éclair) with HTC Sense. Furthermore you can read on the HTC Wildefire product website that:

“With Friend Stream, you can see all your friends’ Facebook updates, Tweets and Flickr photos on the same screen. It updates itself automatically. And when you want to update your own profiles, you can update them all in one go.”

In the article “HTC Wildfire launch event – Driving a Porsche Carrera GT3 @ Circuit Park Zandvoort” on my Personal Blog I shared some interesting information about the massive userbases of the social networks that are part of Friend Stream in HTC Sense !

Close releated is the feature below, in which Facebook information is integrated with the phone dailer software.

“When someone calls you, your Caller ID doesn’t just tell you their name and number any more – it tells you useful stuff like their Facebook status and birthday date, too.”

“Want to tell someone about an app? Send them a link straight from your phone to theirs. There are thousands of apps available on Android Market – including games, social-networking apps and new arrivals every day.”

In the same article on Remo Knops’ Personal Blog you can find some statistics of the explosive growth of applications in the Android Marketplace. The ability to share applications directly among your friends is a very convenient improvement.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GF7r7RInw4

First thoughts and wrap-up

Overall the hardware feels really nice, and like I mentioned before I’m happy to see a capacitive touch screen, and not a resitive one like on the HTC Tattoo (despite the HTC Tattoo was aimed to target the similar market segment).

Google Maps Navigation will become available in the Netherlands this month, and combined with Android 2.1 and the option to share applications with your friends, brings this the best of Android to the HTC Wildfire.

If you add 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen supporting multi-touch, the HTC Sense GUI and an excellent 5.0 megapixel camera to this, you can only conclude that the HTC Wildefire is ready to target the segment “between” the feature phone and the smartphone.

Given the price point of E259,- (including VAT and excluding a subscription) HTC is clearly comitted to play a tough retail game !

What do you think of the pricepoint and the hardware specifications of the HTC Wildfire ??