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HTC Windows Phone Radar tested

by on23 December 2011

Index

The Radar is one of HTC’s first smartphones with Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” OS. We’re talking about upper midrange smartphone that offers many advanced features. HTC’s Titan comes with a bigger screen and a better camera, but the Radar allowed for a good Mango experience as well. Both the Titan and Radar share the same Qualcomm MSM8255 CPU with Adreno 205 GPU, although Titan runs at 1.5GHz while Radar runs at 1GHz.

HTC’s Radar comes with unibody shell and its size makes for comfortable handling, regardless of whether you’re right handed or not. The screen is 3.8’’ whereas the 480x800 resolution is enough for all kinds of content, albeit a bit too small to handle all types of games. HTC opted on a super-LCD screen, which doesn’t boast the contrast found on OLED displays but is on par with upper midrange phones.

The camera is average but will do well on daylight. Unfortunately, steady hands may not help in bad lighting conditions.

HTC’s Radar has 8GB of internal memory, where 6GB is accessible to the user. We haven’t run out of room yet, but we know that there will be users who find 8GB to be too little. Unfortunately, expanding the memory via a micro-SD card is not possible.

The fact that Radar comes with Windows Phone installed may discourage users from purchasing it. However, although we were suspicious ourselves, it turned out that Mango isn’t half bad. In fact, if Microsoft keeps up with the updates, Mango may very well be on track to become a strong competitor to iPhone and Android. 

If what you’re looking for are internet browsing, social networking, listening to music and watching video clips, then WP Mango will not disappoint. In fact, Microsoft did a good job in integrating popular social networks and the phone will gather information and put it one place. Pictures can be posted directly to Facebook or elsewhere. Unfortunately, Skype isn’t working on Mango.

Although the number of available apps is rapidly growing, Mango still doesn’t have what it takes to challenge Android in this respect. Furthermore, we wonder how Microsoft overlooked the poor implementation of missed and received SMS messages and calls, because Mango runs quite well otherwise. Another issue is that the Windows Live account cannot be erased without hard-resetting the phone.

All in all, we’d still recommend trying out the Radar and Mango because Radar is a good phone whereas Mango is the best Windows Phone so far.

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Top Value 2011

 

 

 

 

 


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Last modified on 23 December 2011
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