Is HTCrebooting its Wildfire series? New store listing suggests so

The HTCWildfire and Wildfire S were two of the company’s more popular phones in the early days of Android, focusing on the budget segment. Now, it looks like almost ten years after the last model, the Wildfire name is making a return.

According to Russian blog mobiletelefon.ru (h/t: GSMArena), a listing for an HTCWildfire E has surfaced on a Russian retailer’s website. True to the Wildfire name, the new phone appears to be a budget purchase too.

The retailer website reportedly lists the phone as having a 5.45-inch HD+ LCD screen, a UniSoC SC9863 chipset, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a 3,000mAh battery.

The chipset in particular is rather intriguing, as it packs eight Cortex-A55 cores and a PowerVR GPU (IMG8322). The Cortex-A55 cores mean it should theoretically be more powerful than almost any other low-end octa-core processor out there, as virtually all of these SoCs offer older Cortex-A53 cores instead. The Cortex-A55 offers an 18 percent performance boost over the Cortex-A53, as well as a 15 percent improvement in terms of power efficiency.

In saying so, the UniSoc chipset is designed on a 28nm process, as opposed to 16nm and smaller used by the likes of Qualcomm. And a smaller manufacturing process generally means better sustained performance and longer endurance.

Other purported HTCWildfire E specs include a 13MP+2MP rear camera combo, a 5MP selfie snapper, microUSB connectivity, a 3.5mm port, and Android Pie.

Whether this is a great deal or not depends on the price, but the Wildfire S was available for under $300 at the time of its release. Hopefully HTCaims even lower with the new phone, otherwise Huawei and Xiaomi will leave the Taiwanese giant in the dust.