HTC Sensation & Wildfire S Launches; Wild & Sensational Party Ensues

June 25 15:32 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

While we’re grown accustomed to the style of usual launch events for tech and other products – mostly eye catching visuals with alluring models and celebrities, we’ve still got to hand it to HTC for the Sensation and Wildfire S launch. They’ve effectively turned it up to 11 with this one and brought out all the guns, it seems. For HTC’s flagship Sensation, and the hip Wildfire S, we guess there really was no reason to compromise. Here’s our coverage.

HTC kicks off the launch with a slew of dancing and models walking through the stage and around the crowd showing off the two new Android smartphones – the Wildfire S and the Sensation. This didn’t seem too far from what we’d normally expect, but it definitely was bigger and more dialed-in than their previous launches. Indeed, what better way to bring out HTC’s newest dual-core beast and its colorful friend than making it wild and sensational? And just between us, it did seem like the temperature at the event rose 10 degrees at this point. Thankfully, they took time to cool it down and formally introduced their two new smartphones.

The HTC Sensation

We’ve covered the Sensation before, but if you’re not familiar with it, we’ll give you a refresher. The HTC Sensation is the Taiwanese company’s new flagship device for 2011. Bringing with it all the newest hardware you can find for an Android device. It packs a 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, 4.3” LCD screen running at a high 960×540 resolution, 8MP Camera with LED capable of 1080p video, front facing VGA camera, WiFi b/g/n, and all of the usual Android hardware features. It’s built from one block of aluminum, albeit a little different from the usual HTC unibody – the body detaches from the internals to reveal the battery, SIM and SD card slots. The phone runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and has all the new features of Sense 3.0 with the carousel homescreens and all the new “3D” widgets and features. A flagship through and through, HTC is poising this to compete with Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S II dual-core Android device.

The HTC Wildfire S

We’re no strangers to the Wildfire S either as its already available at local retailers, but HTC took the opportunity to formally introduce it’s new colorful budget device. It’s an upgrade to last year’s Wildfire – packing a new 480×320 3.2” LCD capacitive screen, 600Mhz processor, 5MP Camera with LED and VGA video recording. It’s one of the few budget phones out there that comes out of the box with Android 2.3 Gingerbread – a feature that, coupled with its budget price, makes it a pretty decent choice. And speaking of choice, you can get one in pink, white and gray.

After all the formalities, they call out a whole slew of local celebrities from our top local television stations to speak. They take turns sharing their experiences with the phones and how they’ve been using them everyday. The Wildfire S seems to be a pretty popular choice with its small, colorful design and a good Sense interface on top, but the Sensation definitely has its fans within them for the extra muscle it packs. There’s definitely something for everybody here – and if you’re unsure, pick your celeb of choice and follow their lead, we guess.

To conclude the festivities, a final round of dancing and model trotting was driven around as a means to kick off the afterparty. And party indeed, as everyone was still welcome to stick around and enjoy the venue – including having a few drinks along the way. Overall, we think the Sensation and the Wildfire S launch was a success, and we have to hand it to their organizers for a job well done.

The two new smartphones are available now at your local retailers with an SRP of PHP 31,990 for the Sensation and PHP 15,500 for Wildfire S. If you’re keen to pick out some bargains, you can get these phones for less at some retailers like CMKCellphones, who have these phones for PHP 28,000 and PHP 13,000 respectively. If you check right now, they also have the HTC Flyer 7” tablet, which we’ll talk about in another article.

For more pictures of the event, check out the gallery below.