Let’s say hello to HTC Titan’s little brother, HTC Radar. Even if it doesn’t have its big brother’s advanced skills, this fellow will struggle to fulfill your needs and I assure you that it will succeed. You’ll see why in the following review.
Key features:
3.8" 16M-color capacitive LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
Dual-band 3G with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps)
Windows Phone 7 operating system
1GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Snapdragon chipset
512MB RAM, 512MB ROM
5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, geotagging and a hardware shutter key
720p video recording @ 30fps
8GB of built-in storage
Standard 3.5mm audio jack
Standard microUSB port (charging)
Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
Wi-Fi b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
Accelerometer for screen auto rotation
Office document editor
Facebook integration and cloud services
Built-in A-GPS receiver
Stereo FM Radio with RDS
Comes with HTC Hub and exclusive HTC apps
Full specs here.
In its box, you’ll find a microUSB cable, a detachable charger and the one-piece headset. No microSD card and that’s because Windows Phone doesn’t support them yet, but at least the phone has an internal storage of 8 GB, which is quite enoughif you ask me.
I hope I didn’t upset the Radar when I called it “little”, for it proves itself to be quite a tough guy. And it isn’t little at all, if you come to think about it’s dimensions: 115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3 mm and with a weight of 137 g, this phone is far from being delicate, but don’t imagine a beast either. It’s a very nicely built device and the aluminum unibody makes it look great. On the back, it has two parts made of a rubberized plastic. I must say that HTC used only the best materials when designing this phone, I’ve carried it for more than a few days in my pocket next to other stuff like keys, without any protection, and it doesn’t have a scratch. It’s solid, compact and comfortable in the hand and I, for myself, couldn’t ask more from a phone. “Heavy is good, heavy is reliable!” – well, it’s not actually like that, but I’m not the biggest fan of light weights either.
The front houses the 3.8 inches S-LCD screen with a WVGA resolution and Gorilla Glass protection. The viewing angles are good and the sunlight legibility is also very decent, so you’ll surely like the phone from this point of view. Above the display, you’ll come across some proximity and ambient light sensors and a secondary 1.3 MP camera, used for video-calling. Beneath the screen, there are three capacitive keys: back, home and search.
On the phone’s left side is the microUSB port and on the right side, you’ll find the volume rocker and camera button. The top holds the 3.5mm audio jack and the Power/Lock key. The bottom hosts only the mouthpiece.
The phone comes packed with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, a very simple interface which comes with better support for social networking and multitasking. HTC Radar brings a very capable hardware package, that includes a 1 GHz Scorpion CPU, Adrena 205 GPU, 512 MB of RAM and 512 MB of ROM. Not bad, huh ?
In terms of telephony, the phone does a very good job, as the call quality is great, the voices being loud and clear for all the parties and the call reception is as well. The phone provides an interesting and very cute, I must say, application: the People Hub. It’s like a phonebook which has the contacts replaced with people’s profiles. When looking at a contact’s profile, you can call him or her, text, write on wall and so on. You also have voice dialing and support for video-calling.
You’ll have a satisfying experience when messaging, as the phone’s keyboard is very comfortable to use.
When it comes to connectivity, the phone comes loaded with support for Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA, quad-band GSM/GPRS/ EDGE, dual-band 3G with HSPA (14.5 Mbps downlink and 5.76 Mbps uplink) and stereo Bluetooth 2.1.
You’ll enjoy browsing on the HTC Radar. It uses an upgraded Internet Explorer as the standard browser that works great: the pages are looking nice and they’re loaded very fast and you have the feature for multiple tabs. No Flash support, though.
The phone’s 5MP camera comes takes pictures at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 and comes loaded with a 28mm wide-angle f2.2 lens, a back-side illuminated sensor, autofocus and a LED flash. Oh, and geo-tagging. You also have settings for scene modes, effects, contrast, saturation, ISO, sharpness and others. The image quality is very good, as the colors look great and are the same with the real ones. The video camera shoots in 720p at 30fps and also provides a big amount of settings and offers good video quality.
The music player supports formats like MP3, WAV, WMA and eAAC+ and is kind of simple, lacking an equalizer, but the phone compensates that with a really good audio quality.
You’ll like watching videos on the HTC Radar, but it only supports MP4, WMW. You can convert AVI files to MP4 on your computer, using a software called Zune.
You have Office support for viewing and editing Word and Excel documents. PowerPoint files can only be viewed, you can’t edit them. For other applications, you have the Windows Phone Marketplace, so feel free to get anything you want.
The phone also provides a GPS receiver with A-GPS support and uses Bing Maps for navigation. You can find out about tourist attractions, for example, with a new feature called Local Scout.
The HTC Radar comes with a 1520mAh battery that will strongly endure more than a day of heavily usage, so you can browse, take pictures, play games and listen to music all day long without concerning about the battery, because it cares about its life and will hold on to it as long as it can.
My final words are that this phone’s going to be your best friend if you’re after a smart and good looking device. The simple, but pretty and well-built design hosts a “brainy” package, with a big amount of skills. I’m talking about the powerful hardware, fancy phonebook, good image, video and audio quality and the really efficient browser. Oh, and let’s not forget about the battery, which is definitely a fighter. All of these features are proof that this phone is trying to make you happy.
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