Affordable smart phone

Both my hubby's Sony Ericsson hand phone and our 2 years old Olympus waterproof digital camera are having some problems during the past week. We have to replace both these 2 toys as soon as possible. Normally I will read up some review and search in the web before making the decision to buy which model/brand. As hubby is so busy with his office work, as usual, his secretary (aka his wife) has to read up the phone and camera reviews and give him the comments and the relevant links. Is this also task of SAHM?

For the hand phone, we are now looking at smart phone below RM2k. I have shorlisted a few models and the top pick in the list is one of the latest HTC babies that was launched in July 2010 - HTC Wildfire (The low-cost version of HTC Desire. I love Desire, but it is too costly to us at the moment since we are upgrading few things in the same month).


Hubby is interested in the new Android and this device runs Android™ 2.1 with HTC Sense™, which matches with his requirement. This is an entry-level Android device with a generous 3.2 albeit low-resolution QVGA 320 x 240 screen, WiFi, Bluetooth and A-GPS support, as well as a 5MP camera with LED flash and auto focus. The processing power for the Wildfire comes in the form of 528Mhz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor with 384MB of RAM. The Wildfire has 512MB built-in memory and it supports expansion in Micro SD format up to 32GB. Details of specification could be found in the below website.
http://www.htc.com/sea/product/wildfire/specification.html

I have read through many of the reviews from CNET, Techradar, Phonearena and etc and the main negative point is the low resolution display screen whereas its main plus point is its cost as an inexpensive Android phone. We would like to find out more based on the actual phone but was surprised that the phone is out of stock for most of the hand phone dealers during our weekend shopping. So, we have to do some shopping again next week for the phone.

As for the camera, we have yet to decide which one to buy as there are still a lot of reviews and comments need to be read up since this is the first time that we are going to invest in a DSLR camera (or digital camera with SLR photo quality). Money, money and money again!!