The bottom line: The HTC Radar is a pretty smartphone and a good introduction for any user to the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango experience. You may want to wait for Nokia's upcoming WP7 smartphones before locking in your purchase.
Announced at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin, HTC's new Radar comes packing an impressive which includes a unibody aluminum chassis. The handset will run Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) and be available in Singapore come October with a S$569 (US$458) price tag.Right from the start, it's obvious the Radar takes much of its looks from other HTC devices. Like the HTC Sensation, the Radar features an aluminum unibody chassis, while also looking much like a smaller Flyer tablet (especially from the back). The while paint job is a nice touch, giving the smartphone a "clean" feel which stands out amidst a sea of darker-colored handsets.
The Radar features a much smaller 3.8-inch display with a WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) resolution. While we would have preferred the larger screen size of the HTC Titan, the Radar's display was more than adequate for our needs.
Windows Phone 7 devices tend to have three buttons located below the screen, but it seems HTC is continuing its trend of not using physical buttons. The Radar comes with three backlit touch-sensitive buttons. And unlike the recent HTC Evo 3D, we didn't find ourselves accidentally hitting the buttons while typing on the phone's virtual keyboard.
On the right side are the volume control and camera shortcut buttons, while the 3.5mm audio jack and the power button are located at the top. You'll find the micro-USB port located on the left side.
You'll also find a VGA camera located on the front for video conferencing (which Mango now supports) and a rear 5-megapixel camera which features a quick F2.2 aperture, a backside-illuminated sensor (BSI) for low light shots as well as an LED flash.
There's no microSD slot on the handset, which means you will have to live with its 8GB of onboard storage. Note that the 1,520mAh battery is non-removable, and opening the rear cover to remove your SIM card will automatically shut down the smartphone.
Besides the Mango operating system, HTC has added its own apps to deliver a much better experience. There's the HTC Hub for example, which gives you stock prices, weather reports and news feeds delivered in one central location.
There's also the HTC Watch service that you'll find on the other HTC smartphones, but right now you can only view trailers. We're still waiting on HTC to launch the rental service. There's also a Photo Enhancer app, which lets you touch up your shots and take panoramic pictures.
While the company wasn't able to use its own Sense UI skin on the Radar, it has added its "flip to mute ringer" and pocket mode (which rings louder while in a pocket or bag) features into the smartphone. You can also flip the handset while on a call to turn on the speaker. Lastly, the phone, while ringing, will automatically turn quieter when you pick it up.
As a smartphone that ships with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, the Radar comes with Internet Sharing built-in. This lets you use the handset as a Wi-Fi hotspot, which can be pretty handy.
Storage-wise, the HTC Radar comes with only 8GB onboard (as mentioned earlier). However, only 6.54GB is available for use. There's no microSD slot, which means you'll have to make do with just that small amount.
We found the 5-megapixel camera's image quality to be average, but outdoor shots did turn out pretty good. The camera also supports 720p HD video recording. We liked the quick shutter too, (which helps to take shots of moving critters). The BSI sensor does help somewhat with low-light shots, while the LED flash does an adequate job of lighting up the dark areas, thought we note it can be quite uneven.
The HTC Radar features only the minimum required 1GHz processor, unlike the faster HTC Titan. That said, we didn't experience any slowdowns that impacted our usage. Mango has also added multitasking as a key feature, but most apps do not support this function yet (they would be closed upon exiting, and restart when reopened), so we were unable to properly assess this aspect of the handset's performance.
The Radar's battery would give you about a day's usage with a little bit (around 15 percent) left over. You'll probably need to charge this every night (or in the morning) so as not to end up with a drained handset. Since the battery is non-removable, you'll definitely want to make sure your phone is juiced up before heading out.
That said, we like to point out that our usual test settings were unavailable--Twitter does not support push notifications in Mango, and both Twitter and Facebook apps could not be set with our usual two hour refresh interval test settings.