HTC announced its first two Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" phones today, including the HTC Titan, a beast of a phone with a huge 4.7-inch screen and the fastest processor we've ever seen on a Windows Phone yet. We got some hands-on time, which showed how the Titan's 1.5-Ghz Qualcomm processor makes a difference for Web browsing and gaming.
Of the two phones, dubbed the Radar and the Titan, the Titan is clearly the flagship here. This phone is a gigantic black slab at 5.2 by 2.2 by .4 inches and 5.6 oz, bigger even than HTC's Sensation, which is already a big phone. The 4.7-inch screen only has 800-by-480 resolution—that's a Microsoft requirement—but HTC pointed out that makes touch targets in apps like Excel easier to hit. Still, though, I would have liked to see the 960-by-540 that is becoming standard on larger phone screens.
The phone is clad in matte black metal and plastic, and it has a heavy, solid feel, much like the super-successful HTC EVO 4G for Sprint. There's an 8-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front, and the phone has 16GB of storage. The two new phones don't come with Skype—yet—but they will come with the new Tango video chat software, so you'll be able to use that front camera.
The Titan's big news is its processor, though. Microsoft mandates the Qualcomm 8255 "series 2" processor for new Mango phones, and most 8255-based phones run at 1Ghz. Not the Titan, which is clocked up to 1.5Ghz and shows increased performance as a result (see below.)
The Titan is joined by the HTC Radar, a smaller (4.7 by 2.4 by .4 inches, 4.8 oz) and apparently lower-cost phone with somewhat lower-key specs. The Radar has a unibody metal frame—no removable battery here!—but it's easier to hold in smaller hands, thanks to its 3.8-inch LCD screen. The back camera takes 5-megapixel photos, the front camera is an even 1 megapixel, the processor runs at 1Ghz, and there's 8GB of on-board storage.
Both phones are initially coming out in Europe in October as GSM, HSPA 14.4 devices. There's no U.S. release planned yet, and versions of these phones could come out on any carrier here, whether GSM or CDMA. HTC didn't give prices, either.
Apps and Benchmarks
Phone manufacturers don't have much leeway to skin Windows Phone, but HTC added some features nonetheless. HTC's Hub app still offers gorgeous weather graphics and charts, along with stock prices and an RSS reader. A new "Location" app brings the GPS-based Footprints technology over from Android, allowing you to mark locations where you've been and make little notes to yourself. In the settings screens, "attentive phone" adds features like muting the ringer if you flip the phone face-down, and HTC has also incorporated SRS and 5.1 sound.
Mango brings a bunch of new features to all Windows Phones, though. You can find the details in our hands-on with Windows Phone Mango. Windows phones now have the ability to multitask, to create groups of contacts, to integrate Twitter accounts, transcribe voice dictation into messages, and a lot more. Some features were still a little buggy on the pre-release devices I saw—the Local Scout local search app had some odd ideas of what the top attractions in New York were, for instance. (A dog spa? Maybe if you're a dog.)
To compare the Titan's and Radar's performance, we ran the Browsermark and Sunspider browser benchmarks and played Cro-Mag Rally, a driving game. The differences were striking and easily noticeable. The Titan scored 32771 on Browsermark, as compared to the Radar's 21026. On Sunspider, where lower scores are better, the Titan got 66.03, while the Radar scored 94.40. The 50 percent better performance translates neatly into the 50 percent faster processor.
The two Windows Phones still track behind the leading Android 2.3 devices on the browser benchmarks, but both of those results are a dramatic improvement from pre-Mango results. The Samsung Focus with NoDo, the previous version of Windows Phone, scored 6903 on Browsermark and couldn't even complete Sunspider 0.9.1.
In Cro-Mag Rally, the Titan's frame rate was noticeably higher, making for much smoother background animation. While the game was perfectly playable on the Radar, the background was a bit jerky compared to the Titan.
HTC's Big Party
The phones are being introduced in an unusual manner: at HTC "fan parties" in London, Paris, Barcelona, and Berlin, rather than at the IFA trade show, which is going on now. We've been seeing more of these informal events recently. RIM chose a fan event in Toronto to show off several of its new BlackBerry 7 phones.
Fan events attract people who are guaranteed to be enthusiastic about new products, as opposed to skeptical press. And with the Internet, that fan enthusiasm is guaranteed to go global, laying a positive groundwork for later impressions of the phones.
These won't be the last Mango phones from HTC. The company said to expect more announcements through the rest of the year, although it wouldn't give specific details.