Overall

The Radar isn’t the best phone out there, but it is quite good. If you can get past the hardware drawbacks, like the small 8 GB of storage space, 1.0 GHz processor, and the lack of a gyroscope, the phone is actually quite perfect. The 3.8” size is ideal for most users, the build quality of the phone is spectacular, and the camera has significantly improved from before. Samsung phones are better in some areas like camera and screen type, but the Radar is still a nice device.

Specs

The HTC Radar is a new Windows Phone with a 3.8” S-LCD screen, HSPA+ data speeds, and a 1.0 GHz single-core processor. The phone has a new 5-megapixel rear camera, a front-facing camera, and 8 GB of storage. It is currently for sale in numerous countries and is sold in the United States through T-Mobile.

Hardware

The build quality of the HTC Radar is superb. The phone feels fantastic in your hand. Unlike the HD7, the buttons on the phone feel solid and the entire phone feels sturdy. While the aluminum unibody makes the phone heavier and means you can’t remove the battery, it is completely worth it since the phone looks exceptional and feels like a BMW M3 rather than a Honda Civic.

It isn’t the thinnest phone, coming in at 0.43 inches, but it is thinner than the old HD7 which is a nice improvement.

One of the biggest disappointments aobut the Radar is the small 8 GB of storage space. When you first start the phone, you only have about 5.15 GB of useable space! And there’s no storage card slot, so you’re stuck with this ridiculous amount.

The “S-LCD” screen also isn’t that impressive. It’s hardly any brighter than a standard LCD display when in direct sunlight. The Super AMOLED display from last year’s Focus easily destorys this. The colors on the S-LCD compared to the normal LCD are slightly more vibrant, but are definitley not worth paying for.

Continuing with the disappointments, the phone lacks a gyroscope and also doesn’t include a wired headset for some reason. Also, the phone only has a single-core 1.0 GHz processor.

However, this processor isn’t the same one that’s in your old Windows Phones. This is the second generation Snapdragon, which also includes a new Adreno 205 graphics processor. These new components actually make the phone slightly more fluid when scrolling through certain apps. It also uses NAND storage memory instead of a SD card, which makes apps load a little faster.

Also, the 3.8” screen size is perfect for almost everything. Unlike those bigger screens, you can actually type one-handed with ease. Typing with both thumbs is also not a problem since the screen is still decently big.

Overall, the build quality of the phone is superb, but some of the specs are disappointing. Nevertheless, if you don’t need a lot of storage space, this phone is a great choice and is also pretty cheap. Keep watching WMPowerUser over the next week to catch the rest of our review on the HTC Radar.

Music and Call Quality

The volume of the speakers is similar to the HD7, which unfortunately isn’t the loudest; but the Radar did see an improvement in sound quality. When listening through the Radar’s speakers, the sound is less distorted than the HD7. The sound quality through wired headphones is also slightly better, but it doesn’t of course compare to the sound quality of the Zune.

The Radar features the Sound Enhancer app which all HTC phones come with, so you can play around with equalizers and sound settings as you please. Leaving it on the default SRS enhancement seems to work best however.

Call quality saw the greatest improvements in the Radar. One of the worst things about the HD7 was the low volume on the earpiece. The Radar fixes this, and sounds even clearer. Plus, the speakerphone is even louder, and picks up your voice perfectly. If you own the HD7, improved call quality would be a major reason to upgrade to the Radar.

Stay tuned for our Camera and Video Recording review coming up soon!

Camera

A red flower, looking slightly too pink

While everyone is raving about the Titan’s camera, little has been said about it’s smaller sibling, the HTC Radar. In short, the Radar has some great improvements over other HTC cameras, but falls short of the Titan likely due to its 5-megapixel sensor.

Colors in pictures are still not accurately represented, which always was a problem with HTC’s phones. The flower picture shown on the right is of a red flower, but the flower looks more pink through the Radar. However, the Radar does do a better job than the HD7, making it a slight improvement from before.

The Radar also handles over-saturation slightly better than the HD7 used to. When looking at pictures of flowers, the Radar kept the color saturation in control while the HD7 was over-saturated.

Indoor scenes show the best improvement, thanks to the new low light sensor included in the Radar. Pictures aren’t shaky and motion blurred anymore, and actually look decent.

The camera also features some new modes, like Panoramic and Burst mode, which are great additions. The panoramic shots usually stitch together quite well, but sometimes have random glitches in them. The burst mode is great for capturing a crazy stunt, but can become annoying because there’s no way to easily delete burst shots… take three of them, and you have 15 pictures on your phone in less than 10 seconds!

A panoramic shot from the Radar

You can also play around with advanced camera settings like ISO and White Balance, which is a nice touch since HTC never included that before.

Radar takes indoor shots without motion blur!

The LED flash isn’t nearly as bright as the HD7′s dual LED flash, but it usually gets the job done. However, HTC isn’t smart enough to turn the LED on briefly to focus the shot before taking it, so you may end up with blurry shots. Samsung figured that one out, I’m not sure why HTC can’t.

Nevertheless, the biggest improvement in the camera is the shutter speed. Previously, the time between pressing the camera button and the camera actually taking the picture was nearly a half second. Now, HTC cut that down to about 0.2 seconds, so you can capture a moving target almost immediately.

The video quality has also improved some. The frame rate of shots filmed indoors is slightly better than old HTC phones, which always suffered from extremely low frame rates at night. However, the Radar still kind of sucks at filming things at night. The year old Samsung Focus easily destroys the Radar at night, thanks to its butter smooth frame rate, despite how dimly lit the scene is.

The videos also record stereo audio, and sound pretty decent for a mobile phone.

Overall, the new camera is a big improvement for HTC in general. If you have an old HTC phone, the camera alone could be a great reason to upgrade. However, if you were on a different brand like Samsung, it’s likely that your camera is already as good or better than this.

Software and Battery Life

The Radar is, of course, running Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and is as smooth as any other Windows Phone. In fact, it may be even smoother in certain apps, thanks to the new GPU.

There are some apps unique to HTC on the phone, like the HTC Hub. Some of these free apps are highly worth choosing an HTC phone, like the Flashlight app which allows you to use your LED flash as a flashlight, something that Samsung phones lack. HTC also added a panoramic and burst mode to the camera, and added facial recognition to help focus the camera.

Also, since the Radar is a new Windows Phone, it has Internet Sharing enabled. Internet Sharing works flawlessly and provides you with a surprisingly fast connection thanks to T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. The range of the signal is quite good too, since it easily covers a small apartment with a full signal everywhere.

The battery life on the Radar is a huge improvement. I performed a music and a video playing test between the HD7 and the Radar, with both phones in airplane mode and with every other variable the same. To account for the difference in battery size, I expressed the battery life in minutes per mAh of battery. Watch this video for more details.

In the music battery test, I found that the Radar was able to play about 7.89 minutes of music per 1 mAh of battery, while the HD7 could only play 1.15 minutes per 1 mAh of battery.

In the video battery test, the results weren’t as drastic. I calculated that the Radar would be able to play a video for 10 hours until its 1520 mAh battery would die, while the HD7 would only be able to play for 6.15 hours with the same 1520 mAh battery. Nevertheless, almost twice the video playback time is a huge difference!

Overall, those huge improvements in the battery and the new software features like Panoramic photo mode and Internet Sharing are definitely worth upgrading for!

In terms of the WP7 operating system itself, there are of course some things it could improve on, but thanks to Mango it is finally a great contender in the smartphone league.