HTC Radar Review

The HTC Radar features the unibody aluminium design with the plastic portion around the base opening up to insert your SIM card. There is no way to access the battery and when you insert or remove your SIM card, the phone tends to restart. The silver colour of the unibody finish runs along the edge on the front portion and covers a majority of the rear portion. We had got the white coloured model.

It is also available in black. On the front fascia you have the three touch sensitive buttons - Back, Home and Bing search. On the top left hand corner you have the proximity sensor and the VGA front facing camera on the right hand corner. Coming to the top you have the power/sleep button on the right hand side and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left hand side.

The left hand edge has the micro USB slot whereas on the right hand edge you have long volume rocker on the top edge and camera shutter button below. Flip around the phone and you get the 5MP camera which has a fixed aperture of F2.2 beside which you have the LED flash and a speaker section on the other side.

The HTC Radar is a 3.8-inch capacitive touchscreen phone having an S-LCD screen with the gorilla glass on top. It houses the Qualcomm MSM 8255 system-on-chip with a 1 GHz Scorpion processor and Adreno 205 GPU. It comes with an internal storage of 8 GB without any option to add external memory, which effectively means that you have only 6.54 GB at your disposal after budgeting the memory taken up by the OS and native apps.

AS you cannot skin Windows Phone OS, HTC has added some native apps. Some of the interesting ones are HTC Hub – which gives you the weather readings of your area and you can add around five other cities; Photo Enhancer allows you to add filters to photos; Flashlight allows you to use your LED flash as a flashlight; Locations is very similar to FootPrints seen on Android phones which allows you to take pictures and geo tag them along with information such as directions, website etc and finally HTC Watch allows you to purchase movies and TV shows, but we could not get this working here as the screen always used to prompt us to download updates and it only had Trailers tab.

The interface as is the case with Windows Phone OS, does not appear cluttered and the live tiles are carried forward in this update. If you have more than 45 applications, then it divides them into alphabets which makes accessing them easy.

Multitasking is a major feature of this iteration, allowing you to play music in the background while you are on another app. But if you are downloading stuff and minimise the screen, it resumes from where it had stopped when its reactivated. Social integration includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and you can sync your Yahoo, Gmail and Windows Live account.

Users who are migrating from Android and Apple will have to do a lot of unlearning as the tile interface is the underlying theme in most apps. Twitter and Facebook apps for instance are completely different from those seen on the other OSes. Facebook tile on the homepage keeps flipping photos of your contacts. Messaging and Mail tiles keep getting updated the moment you get any new message, giving you a quick view of unread mails or messages.

The integration philosophy around contacts is quite good. You can have all your social connectivity and contact information under one umbrella, so that you get all the notifications related to a particular contact in one place. You can also create groups for group messaging.