I was using a friend's HTC Wildfire last night, HTC Sense and a slow CPU. Text messages opened just about instantly.

I expected it to be slow phone, but in fact everything was snappy. The screen however was far too small for a proper touchscreen smartphone. 240 x 320 just isn't big enough for a phone that has an on screen keyboard.

Also the font rendering in the browser was very poor, not sure what was going on there.