HTC wanted no middle ground for its first Windows Phone “Mango” handsets, launching one phone with a 3.8-inch display, and another with a massive 4.7-inch display.
The HTC Radar is the smaller of the two, and packs a 1 GHz processor, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, a VGA front-facing camera, 8 GB of storage and 512 MB of RAM.
The larger HTC Titan has a 1.5 GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera in back, a 1.3-megapixel camera up front, 16 GB of storage and 512 MB of RAM.
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Spec-wise, the Titan is the more capable phone, and its higher clock speeds led to better performance in benchmarks by PC Mag. The question is whether you can handle the Titan’s huge frame, which measures 5.18 inches by 2.78 inches by 0.39 inches. We’ve seen phone makers move toward bigger handsets lately, such as the 4.5-inch Galaxy S II on Sprint and T-Mobile, and HTC’s 4.3-inch Sensation, but now HTC is going way over the top for its flagship Windows Mango Phone.
Both phones have 800-by-480 resolution displays, per Microsoft’s specifications. They’re also pre-loaded with video chat software from Tango, which’ll have to suffice until Skype arrives on—and possibly gets integrated into—Windows Phones.
For now, HTC isn’t announcing any U.S. launch details for the Radar and Titan. In Europe, they’ll launch in October with support for HSPA+ speeds on GSM networks. HTC also plans to announce more Mango phones before the end of the year, PC Mag reports, so maybe the company will try to hit the 4-inch to 4.3-inch sweet spot, after all.
Mango is the software update that Microsoft is rolling out to Windows Phones this fall. It’ll bring essential features to the platform, including multitasking, HTML5 support, speech-to-text, turn-by-turn directions and Twitter integration. So far, HTC is only the second company to announce new hardware with Mango pre-installed—Fujitsu was the first, with a phone for Japan only—but more announcements are expected from Samsung, LG and Nokia.