The screen of the HTC Wildfire is nowhere near as sharp as sharp as those of its bigger brothers; of course, this is one of the elements that keeps the costs down. While it's not a terrible screen, the QVGA resolution just doesn't have that same eye-stroking high octane power of the HTC Desire and HTC Legend's AMOLED displays. Still, at least it’s not resistive like its predecessor, theHTC Tattoo.

The screen quality also means that pictures taken on the camera don't always look as good as they do on your desktop. Though it would be infinitely more annoying if this were the other way round it does mean that the Wildfire doesn't give you a true idea of a picture's quality. The screen also is difficult to use in bright sunlight so you may struggle to frame shots correctly.

The HTC Wildfire syncs Facebook and contact information so that your friends profile pictures and latest status updates are displayed on the screen when you or they call. While this Facebook integration is pretty nice we found that sometimes it doesn't always assign the most recent profile picture to the contact and nor could we find any way to change this. Also when someone's calling you it's probably not best to pause to read their status update, as there's every chance they'll hang up before you get round to answering them.

On the whole, the Wildfire runs pretty smoothly, but we couldn't help but notice a couple of little things. While the Facebook and Twitter apps from the Market both worked fine, HTC's onboard Friend Stream widget, which aggregates status updates and tweets into one stream, was sluggish and unresponsive on the Wildfire. We've seen this in action on the HTC Desire where it performs better.

Also activating the leap mode by double tapping the home key was sometimes clunky, but you can also trigger leap mode by performing a quick pinch to zoom gesture on the screen which works a bit better. This is probably due to the 528 MHz processor, which obviously wont be able to match the 1GHz processor of the HTC Desire