Cheap Windows Phone thrills: hands on with the HTC Radar

The HTC Radar on T-Mobile is an entry-level Windows Phone handset that doesn’t sound so great on paper, with middling internals and battery life, but its performance is better than mere numbers would suggest. While it has some concrete drawbacks, it strikes us as a decent little phone in the $99-with-contract bracket.

The Radar feels solid, even a little chunky, though at 10.8 millimeters it’s only slightly thicker than the iPhone 4S (which itself isn’t nearly the thinnest phone out there). But the front of the Radar curves into the back in such a way that I love holding it. The way I feel holding this phone is probably the way I should feel holding a human infant.

This may be because in recent weeks my hands have mostly embraced the rectangular iPhone 4S, but I enjoy holding the Radar more than any phone I’ve handled recently. While this might seem an odd “feature” to rave about, I submit that there are few, if any, things you will spend more time doing with a smartphone than holding it. Even better, the haptic feedback makes a solid thrum, pitched low enough that you can feel individual vibrations.

The Radar has a sleep button on the top right, a headphone jack on the opposite side, a volume rocker and camera button on the right side, and a microUSB port for charging on the left. The volume and sleep buttons are so low profile that they have virtually no tactile feedback, so it’s hard to know whether your presses are registering. The camera button, on the other hand, has two levels of click, one that focuses the camera’s lens and another that takes a picture. There are three soft key Windows Phone buttons along the bottom of the screen (Search, Home, Back), and a charging indicator light is embedded in the speaker along the top of the screen.

The Radar has two cameras: one 5-megapixel on the back and a VGA version on the front. The rear camera can capture a decent level of detail given its resolution, but the color balance can vary widely from shot to shot (see the two pictures below of the red leaves). The 720p video the camera takes is likewise serviceable, but takes more than a few seconds to adjust focus if you move between subjects. This camera is much further off from a point-and-shoot camera than are many other smartphones, and this is definite point of compromise to get the $99 price.

The speaker on the Radar is located next to the rear camera, and it is very loud at high volumes. However, quality above 70 percent volume or so is pretty jarring, and it’s just not worth turning it up higher than that.

The Radar’s display is 3.8 inches and 800×480 pixels. It accepts touch input beautifully and accurately, and the virtual keyboard is great to type on. Web pages are rendered more readably than on phones with larger, better screens, though certain levels of zoom will produce pixellated text. The screen is also nice and bright, and readable in sunlight. The only problem is that Bing searches in the browser use light green text as an accent, and that can be hard to read on the white background in full daylight. (Update: a commenter has pointed out that if you change the Radar’s “accent color,” it will persist through to the Bing results.)

The phone runs the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system, and interface navigation is fluid, if at times a little disorganized. The design of many of the home screen icons and menu options within native apps can be too subtle. I expect eventually I’d internalize the location of different frequently-used apps on the home screen despite their information-lite icons, but as it is I would usually swipe the standard home screen to the side and work from the simpler alphabetized list of apps.

Opening and using apps on the Radar takes noticeably longer than on the top tier of handsets. Phones like the Galaxy Nexus go from a tap on Angry Birds to displaying the “Play button” in about two seconds, while the Radar takes seven or eight seconds.

As befits a Windows Phone handset, the processor is a single-core 1GHz Scorpion processor accompanied by 512MB of RAM. Similarly-specced Android phones often feel like the OS is trying to accomplish tasks faster than the phone can reasonably handle them, resulting in laggy, choppy-looking performance, but we get none of that with the Radar. Performance is often slow, but it is almost always smooth.

Windows Phone is a strange land for our usual benchmarks, but running Sunspider 0.9.1 in Internet Explorer reveals a slow browser. The Radar scores just over 9,000 milliseconds in the test, making it one of the slowest phones we’ve tested recently—as a point of reference, the Galaxy Nexus scores under 2,000 milliseconds on the same network (T-Mobile’s HSPA+). In less scientific tests, loading pages at the same time on an iPhone 4S ( which gets a 2,200ms score on Sunspider) and the Radar show that the Radar is 3 or 4 times slower than the iPhone. Videos streamed from Netflix or the included HTC Watch application will have you waiting while they buffer.

The Radar has a 1520mAh non-removable battery that HTC rates at 7.7 hours of talk time. We found that even with a bunch of notifications set up, the Radar was pretty resilient in standby, able to maintain itself over two or three days with light to no use. With heavier use (texting, tweeting, browsing, a bit of gaming) the phone more often than not needed a charge around dinnertime. Battery life while playing video was also a bit of a disappointment: we clocked it at around 5 hours before the phone conked out with WiFi on, 50 percent volume, and the brightness set to “high.” However, with only 8GB of storage, your’e not going to fit much in the way of video on the phone anyway.