The HTC Radar seems like an evolution of the HTC Trophy, and comes complete with Windows Phone 7 Mango to boot.
Decked out in an almost all-aluminium chassis, the Radar is a slightly chunkier device compared to the HTC Titan, and has a more rounded and polished feel to it.
That extra width around the 3.7-inch screen might look slightly less functional than the Titan, but still doesn’t really pack the aesthetic punch of other top-end smartphones – or even those in the HTC Android line up.
It’s probably most closely related to the HTC Flyer in design language, with the plastic elements at the top and the bottom of the phone at the rear housing the antenna and similar – however the Flyer just feels a bit thinner thanks to its overall dimensions.
One thing we’ve always been impressed with on the Windows Phone range is the mandatory addition of a physical camera key – it’s here on the Radar and has a soft yet premium feel when pushing it down – we can see it working well for photography on the fly.
Speaking of which, the HTC Radar has a 5MP camera with 28mm lens, and like the Titan and the HTC Evo 3D, an f/2.2 aperture for lower-light photos. A single LED flash will help take night snaps, but lacks the brightness the dual-LED-toting Titan manages.
The extra functionality HTC has pumped in here is the ability to take burst shots, so you can always capture the pic you want in the midst of a moving scene.
There’s ‘only’ a 1GHz processor on board here, but to our eyes we couldn’t spot much of a difference between it and the Titan, which has 50% more processing grunt inside, when it came to navigating between apps. Both were slick and nigh-on faultless, so we’ll need to give them a proper test in our full review.
There’s a 1520mAh battery on board to keep things chugging along, which is a little larger than the Trophy (which wasn’t too hard on the juice anyway) and we hope this extra power brings us nicely up to a couple of days without clamouring for a charger.
As with the Titan, the audio experience of the Radar is decent yet frustrating.- while for the most part the SRS Surround Sound and the HTC 5.1 enhancements add to music and video, turning them on and off requires you to jump out of the app and into the settings menu – why can’t this be contextual?
It’s elements like this that show how immature Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is – we’re impressed with the slick and swoopy user interface, but we should surely be able to press a button on screen to alter our experience.
Early verdict
So, what do we make of the superbly-monikered HTC Radar? Well, it feels premium, if a little chunky. It has a nicer design than the HTC Titan, and the aluminium chassis sits well in the hand.
But it’s no stunner, and with that you’d have to question why anyone would go for the Windows Phone device ahead of the plethora of better-specified Android handsets on the market with a similar price point.
They have more apps, better cameras, widgets, sleeker designs… Windows Phone is a cool OS and the Live Tiles are definitely a different take on the home screen idea, but we need better hardware that either drips with style or comes in at a very cheap price point – and the HTC Radar doesn’t seem to be either of these.
A middle of the road phone that we’re fully nonplussed about – let’s hope there’s more to come for Windows Phone soon, or its claim to become a front running OS in the next few years is going to be wide of the mark.
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