At the Mobile World Congress 2011, HTC announced a hardware update on their popular high-end HTC Desire and low-end HTC Wildfire. The two handsets get an “œS” added to their name. Feel free to hazard a guess on what “œS” means because HTC didn’t say anything about it.
HTC Desire S
The HTC Desire S is still the same 3.7-inch screen size and Super LCD display as that of the original Desire. Probably the major difference is its aluminum unibody shell like what the HTC Legend used. Gone are the physical buttons and the optical trackpoint, and they added a front-facing camera for video calls.
The processor also gets a tiny bit of an upgrade having the same Snapdragon MSM8255 as that of the Desire HD. The RAM too gets a small boost from 576MB to 768MB and the battery from being a 1400mAh to 1450 mAh.
Aside from these, everything’s pretty much the same. We expected a dual-core processor or more RAM and bigger storage for this upgrade. It’s unclear if it will be recognized by HTC Sense.com like the Desire HD and Desire Z but I hope that it would.
HTC Wildfire S
The HTC Wildfire S also got the buttonless treatment on its front panel. It also received the much-needed resolution upgrade from QVGA to HVGA. The processor also got an upgrade from 528MHz to 600MHz and RAM jumped from 384MB to 512MB. It’s odd though that the battery got jacked down to 1230mAh from 1300mAh.
The HTC WildFire S will come with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) but everything else stays basically the same. At least they came up with the purple color.
So what do you think? Pretty underwhelming right? When others are releasing dual-core mobile devices and 3D, HTC stuck with last year’s devices with some slight design revisions. I don’t mind these updates at all but I wished they unveiled their “œsuperphone” for the year if they have one.
I guess the hottest phones that we’ll anticipate this year to land here are the Samsung Galaxy S II and the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc.