HTC Radar
A dinky Windows phone for basic
users
The HTC Radar is the latest
smartphone to run Windows Phone 7-5, following on from the HTC Titan. With a
smooth unibody design, HD video recording and 5MP camera, there’s a lot packed
into a compact package.
“Unibody - The
term given to a device which is made out of a single piece of metal or plastic.
Unibody design tends to offer a more solid feel”
The Radar, which runs Windows
Phone 7.5 (or ‘Mango’ to its friends; see page 62), is a solid little handset.
It’s crafted from a single piece of metal and has enough weight (137g) to make
it feel sturdy without giving your biceps a workout.
There’s no space for a microSD
card (Windows Phone doesn’t allow for memory expansion) and there’s just 8GB
storage - reduced to just 6.54GB once the operating system has taken its share;
barely enough for some apps, music and photos.
The camera is only 5MP but still
produced decent quality images. It’s suitable for those who only need
occasional camera use.
Snap happy
As if to make up for the lack of
megapixels, HTC spouts specs such as f/2.2 lens and BSI sensor. This may sound
like marketing guff but they do help in the overall picture- taking process,
and make the end results worthy of a print.
HTC’s form for decent cameras
hasn’t been forgotten here. Firstly, having a camera button helps. You don’t
have to fiddle around with gripping the phone a certain way or digging through
menus that may be hard to see on a bright day. Wherever in the Windows Phone 7.5
Mango OS you may be, a long press on the camera button takes you to the camera
screen.
The HTC Radar ships with a
respectable 1520mAh battery. Remember this isn’t a dual core smartphone, so for
a 1GHz processor and average-sized screen, this should see you through a day of
use comfortably. We took it off a
charge at 7am and spent about 20 minutes fiddling with various settings and
catching up on Twitter. Over the course of the next few hours, we sent more
than 30 emails, a couple of texts and made a 21 minute phone call.
Mid-afternoon, we went running
for 90 minutes with the RunKeeper app going, and listened to the FM radio for
about half an hour in the early evening. The Radar kept going, and even by 10pm
it still had about a third of its battery left. We didn’t use it much the
following day and it managed to last until lunchtime before conking out.
If it’s a straight choice between
the HTC Titan and the HTC Radar, we’d recommend the Radar every time, because
it’s so much better in terms of value for money.
That said, it still feels like a
work in progress. We know this will upset Windows fans, but we can’t help
feeling that it’d be better to wait for the next crop of handsets or updates
before committing.
After all, two years is a long
time to be tied into a contract and Windows Phone is not a new platform any
more, by any stretch of the imagination.
THE LG OPTIMUS 4X HD ($560 unlocked)
is LG’s first quad-core model. Powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, it also
has a 4.7-inch display with a 1280-by-720-pixel resolution. The Optimus 4X HD
is available in Europe, but so far LG hasn't announced any plans for North
America.
After two passes in our tests, the
Optimus 4X had an average battery life of 6 hours, 28 minutes. It runs the Android
Ice Cream Sandwich operating system with an LG- branded user interface.
