HTC Wildfire escapes from Yellow Mountain riding Android 2.1 (update: official)
By Thomas Ricker 
posted May 17th 2010 7:17AM
posted May 17th 2010 7:17AM
Update: And it's official. Press release touting a Q3 release for Europe and Asia after the break.
Update 2: Our hands-on is up.
[Thanks, Frank]
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE WITH HTC WILDFIRE
Share apps, updates and experiences with the latest social powerhouse from HTC
LONDON – 18 May, 2010, 07.00 CEST – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today introduced HTC Wildfire™, a new HTC Sense-based Android phone that integrates the most popular social networks to help bring your friends closer to you. HTC Wildfire closely follows the success of the acclaimed HTC Desire and makes the company's signature HTC Sense experience accessible to a younger audience.
"Today's social networks provide an essential forum for friendship with more than 400 million users* – many of whom are young adults – actively sharing their lives with their friends through Facebook," said Florian Seiche, Vice President, HTC EMEA. "HTC Wildfire makes the HTC Sense experience available to young mobile users for the first time. It brings all your communications into one place, whether it's through Facebook, Twitter, text messages, images or email, ensuring that you are never far away from the conversation and always close to your friends."
HTC Wildfire helps you stay connected with those who are most important to you through HTC Sense, a user experience focused on putting people at the centre by making phones work in a more simple and natural way. You won't miss out on the fun as HTC's Friend Stream application seamlessly gathers and displays content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into one organised stream of updates. HTC Wildfire enables you to stay up to date with your friends' posts, comments, alerts and photos, wherever you are.
In addition, each contact viewed in HTC Wildfire's address book includes a thread of recent communications with that person, including when you last spoke, recent text messages and emails, and social network updates. When your friend calls, HTC Caller ID displays their Facebook profile photo and latest update, as well as a reminder if their birthday is fast approaching.
Thanks to a new app sharing widget, HTC Wildfire enables you to recommend an application by email, text message or over social networks. Your friends will receive a link allowing them to find the application on the Android Market with a single click and download it to their phone.
Florian Seiche continued, "We understand that people need a better way to navigate their way through the tens of thousands of applications that are currently available on the Android Market. In fact, our own independent research found that consumers are not only hungry for the latest and most popular applications that their friends are using, they want an easier way to find and download them. For the first time ever, you can recommend the newest and coolest apps to a friend or group of friends with HTC Wildfire. With so many applications to choose from, there's a world of content to discover and pass along to your friends."
HTC's latest advanced smartphone is great for viewing and sharing photos on Flickr and for surfing the internet thanks to its 3.2-inch capacitive touch screen. A five-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash allows you to capture special moments, while a 3.5mm audio jack and micro SD card slot mean you are never without your favourite songs.
Availability
The new HTC Wildfire will be broadly available to customers across major European and Asian markets from Q3 2010.
Share apps, updates and experiences with the latest social powerhouse from HTC
LONDON – 18 May, 2010, 07.00 CEST – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today introduced HTC Wildfire™, a new HTC Sense-based Android phone that integrates the most popular social networks to help bring your friends closer to you. HTC Wildfire closely follows the success of the acclaimed HTC Desire and makes the company's signature HTC Sense experience accessible to a younger audience.
"Today's social networks provide an essential forum for friendship with more than 400 million users* – many of whom are young adults – actively sharing their lives with their friends through Facebook," said Florian Seiche, Vice President, HTC EMEA. "HTC Wildfire makes the HTC Sense experience available to young mobile users for the first time. It brings all your communications into one place, whether it's through Facebook, Twitter, text messages, images or email, ensuring that you are never far away from the conversation and always close to your friends."
HTC Wildfire helps you stay connected with those who are most important to you through HTC Sense, a user experience focused on putting people at the centre by making phones work in a more simple and natural way. You won't miss out on the fun as HTC's Friend Stream application seamlessly gathers and displays content from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr into one organised stream of updates. HTC Wildfire enables you to stay up to date with your friends' posts, comments, alerts and photos, wherever you are.
In addition, each contact viewed in HTC Wildfire's address book includes a thread of recent communications with that person, including when you last spoke, recent text messages and emails, and social network updates. When your friend calls, HTC Caller ID displays their Facebook profile photo and latest update, as well as a reminder if their birthday is fast approaching.
Thanks to a new app sharing widget, HTC Wildfire enables you to recommend an application by email, text message or over social networks. Your friends will receive a link allowing them to find the application on the Android Market with a single click and download it to their phone.
Florian Seiche continued, "We understand that people need a better way to navigate their way through the tens of thousands of applications that are currently available on the Android Market. In fact, our own independent research found that consumers are not only hungry for the latest and most popular applications that their friends are using, they want an easier way to find and download them. For the first time ever, you can recommend the newest and coolest apps to a friend or group of friends with HTC Wildfire. With so many applications to choose from, there's a world of content to discover and pass along to your friends."
HTC's latest advanced smartphone is great for viewing and sharing photos on Flickr and for surfing the internet thanks to its 3.2-inch capacitive touch screen. A five-megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash allows you to capture special moments, while a 3.5mm audio jack and micro SD card slot mean you are never without your favourite songs.
Availability
The new HTC Wildfire will be broadly available to customers across major European and Asian markets from Q3 2010.
@Bash2cool
you're*
ugh tell me again why we can't edit these comments?
Never really used a normal trackball, but HTC's optical trackball isn't that great on my Desire.I think they should revert back to the old fashion clits, or magically improve the optical one...
Did every engadget reader just became retarted?
Cmon guys, where's your common sense? Ever heard of middle/low-class phones for people who do not care about gigahertz's, screen inches and other crap we wan't bigger and bigger with every phone?
HTC is a billionaire and successful company for providing great phones for all sizes of pockets and wallets, so please respect that and let them do their work, earning more money so we can see even greater high-end HTC phones
Looking at the gallery, ‘Jennifer’ hasn’t quite grasped the concept of tweeting… tweeting well anyway!
I don’t see anything wrong with this phone either, there are still people on Pay as You Go plans who need cheaper handsets, just perhaps not most of the readership of Engadget.
Looks like it is just an Android equivalent of the HTC HD Mini.
Like the choice of colours, but where are blue and silver?
FYI its processor runs at 528mhz, not 525 (not even the newer 600mhz Arm 11, c'mon now)
@Wesley
thats what i though at first but if you look at them closely theres no similarity (other than size) hardware wise between the two.
seriously how many handsets does HTC need, they have wayyy too many models that are similar. Personally I would like to see a EVO that will work on Rogers (AT&T). That would make me jump off the iphone ship for sure
QVGA - Are you serious? Why would anyone produce a smartphone device with less than a HVGA resolution at this point?
Damn, HTC releases phones like they're going out of style. Makes it hard to decide which phone to buy.
there are so many HTC phone model now.I wonder how many more will come up next.
What's the differents with the htc hero?
A different body with almost the same specs. And they still can not fix the update for the hero.
Maybe this replaces the Tattoo in their lineup
HTC's last device without FroYo (2.2)?
Seems that there will be new htc for every android update, android 2.2? Yup heregoes the new one, how about your current htcs? Oh just wait 6 months for 2.2 update, what? Of course by then we'll have new htcs for android 2.3!
HTC makes good phones but they just have too much out there to the point where it's hard to differentiate one from another. Plus I think they can use a bit of UI tweaking too.
pfff "htc wildfire"..."htc uncontrolled wildlife oxidation"
I love HTC and all. But instead of releasing a new phone every other week, try making sure the ones already out that is Android OS get their updates and little bugs fixed...
Yellow Mountain? That's frackin funny - but shows your age, and mine. Hopefully you'll work in a Dio reference today as well!