HTC Radar review

The Radar is HTC’s mid-range Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) phone. After a slow start, Windows Phone is maturing, and there are now thousands of apps available in the Marketplace. Compared to the huge flagship HTC Titan, with its 4.7in display, the Radar has a more conservative 3.8in 480×800-pixel S-LCD screen. It’s compact and, at 137g, is 3g lighter than its predecessor – 2010’s HTC 7 Trophy.

The HTC Radar, like many of HTC’s recent handsets, is made almost entirely out of a single sheet of aluminium. There are two contrasting coloured soft touch pads on the back of the device, which aid grip and finish the look of the device off nicely.

The display resolution and screen size are exactly the same as the HTC Trophy, as are the general proportions of the handset, but the Radar is a classier device. Where the Trophy was a thoroughly plastic affair, the Radar feels every bit the premium-grade phone, thanks to its metallic aluminium unibody. The phone has three physical keys: a volume rocker, power/unlock button and the camera shutter key, while the Windows Phone buttons for back, home and search are all touch-sensitive.

Again like the Trophy, the Radar has a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. However, the Radar is powered by Qualcomm’s MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset, which has an Adreno 205 processor at its core. This has around four times the performance of the Trophy’s Adreno 200. There’s 8GB of internal storage, of which you only see 6GB, and no support for microSD cards for expansion. The lack of expandable storage isn’t HTC’s fault, as, like Apple’s iOS, Windows Phone doesn’t support external storage, but we would have liked to have seen 16GB inside the phone.

The chipset and processor led to smooth performance, as on all Windows Phone 7 handsets. Scrolling menus and typing is as smooth as it is on the iPhone 4 and multitasking is handled perfectly by the Qualcomm chipset. Multitasking in Mango works like a cross between webOS and iOS. Holding down the back key takes you to a zoomed-out view where running apps are displayed as cards, and you can flick between them to choose the one you want. As on Apple’s iOS, apps in the background are frozen, so they don’t use processor cycles or battery.

It seems to work, as battery life is another of the Radar’s strong points. During testing we managed to eke around a day and a half of moderate usage (browsing, calls, push email, music) from the handset before the battery finally died.

The Radar’s 5-megapixel camera has a back-illuminated sensor and f/2.2 lens, which yields impressive results in low-light conditions. Video is captured at 720p, and while colours are strong it has a compressed look, and doesn’t measure up to the impressive camera. On the whole, imaging isn’t the Radar’s strong point, but when compared to some of its contemporaries, such as the HTC Desire S, it’s perfectly adequate.

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango brings a new browser – IE 9 Mobile. This uses the same JavaScript engine as Microsoft’s desktop variant, which means speedy browsing and one of the most accomplished browsing experiences you’re likely to find on a mobile. Our tests showed that, over a Wi-Fi connection, IE 9 Mobile was quicker to load web pages then an iPhone 4 running iOS4, but our test HTC Radar phone went back to HTC before our Apple iPhone 4S arrived, so we weren’t able to compare it to Apple’s latest. There’s still no Flash support, unfortunately.

Voice Search has also been vastly improved with Mango, meaning you can use voice commands for pretty much anything from searching the web in Bing to composing texts and emails. The accuracy isn’t always spot on but we found that the device usually hits the mark as long as you keep it short and specific – i.e. ‘open Marketplace’ or ‘open Bing’. HTC’s Hub is also present, as is the company’s Watch (video-on-demand service) and sound enhancements, which you can tinker with in Settings and apply SRS Surround and Equaliser settings to the Radar’s music player.

Microsoft Office Mobile is another key aspect of WP7. This lets you save documents to SkyDrive, Office 365, SharePoint and the phone’s memory, so you’re well served for local and cloud storage. Office Mobile also lets you compose, edit and create new documents, which you can sync with SkyDrive or Office 365. It’s a great application and the addition of 25GB of free storage on Microsoft’s cloud-based SkyDrive is a massive bonus. Other notable Mango improvements include a unified inbox, Bing Scout (local search based on your position), Bing Vision (Microsoft’s version of Google Goggles), smarter Tiles (they now display more information, such as when you have new tweets) and the ability to put groups of people (work contacts, for instance) into a ‘Group’ where you can keep tabs on them.

The Radar has a good camera and, in the shape of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, an excellent operating system. The phone’s main drawbacks are the lack of Flash and the minimal storage space, but this is still a seriously accomplished mid-range smartphone.