Telstra to announce HTC Desire S and Wildfire S launch on 25 May

HTC Desire S and Wildfire S to launch through Telstra in Australia

Ross Catanzariti (PC World) on 16 May, 2011 15:57

Telstra will announce the official launch of the next generation HTC Desire smartphone — the HTC Desire S — along with the HTC Wildfire S Android phone at a media event in Sydney on 25 May.

Read our original HTC Desire review, and check out how it stacked up against the iPhone 4 in our iPhone 4 vs HTC Desire smartphone showdown.

Along with the HTC Desire S, Telstra will also launch the low-end HTC Wildfire S smartphone, a successor to the original Wildfire. The HTC Wildfire was one of the first Android smartphones to be sold on prepaid in Australia.

HTC and Telstra will announce the launch of both Android phones on the evening of 25 May in Sydney. The event will be hosted by Ben Hodgson, HTC's Australia and New Zealand country manager, and Andrew Volard, Telstra's director of mobile products. Although the event is slated for the end of May, both the Desire S and the Wildfire S aren't likely to be available in stores until June.

The HTC Desire S is best described as an evolution of the original HTC Desire. The Desire S features the same 3.7in, capacitive touchscreen, 1GHz Qualcomm processor, and 5-megapixel camera as its predecessor, with a minor RAM increase — 768MB up from 576MB — the biggest change under the hood. The Desire S also gets a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.

Unlike its predecessor, the HTC Desire S's body is constructed from a single piece of aluminium, which HTC calls a "unibody" design. The HTC Desire S will run the latest 2.3 "Gingerbread" version of Google's Android operating system.

Like the Desire S, the Wildfire S is also a very similar phone to its predecessor. It has the same 3.2in, capacitive touchscreen and 5-megapixel camera as its predecessor, with a minor RAM increase (512MB compared to 384MB) and a slightly faster processor (600MHz compared to 528MHz). The HTC Wildfire S is smaller and lighter than the original, and has an improved screen resolution.

The other main improvement centres around the software: the Wildfire S runs the 2.3 Gingerbread version of Google's Android platform along with the latest version of HTC's Sense user interface. The 2.3 Gingerbread version of Android offers a revamped keyboard, better copy and paste, improved power management, and a slicker user interface as improvements over previous versions of Android.