HTC Radar 4G: leaks, announce, release date, pictures and video

The Radar has Windows Phone 7.5 Mango on board out of the box, naturally, and HTC has added its Hub app and some software tweaks to the 5-megapixel camera. Want to know more? Be sure the check out our hands-on with the Radar.

Roadmaps are far from gospel truth — the Hercules was originally on the slate for September — but given what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a good holiday season for T-Mobile customers.

On the bright side, T-Mobile and HTC are keeping the all-white, aluminum unibody design. Specs on the Mango phone are otherwise the same: 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM, a 1,520mAh battery, and a 5-megapixel camera. Beyond that, the Radar is a pretty straightforward, mid-range Windows Phone. If that’s something you’re not familiar with, be sure to check out our hands-on with the HTC Radar and read our review of the Mango update.

The second of HTC’s two new Windows Phones announced today, the mid-range HTC Radar comes equipped with a 3.8-inch Super LCD display, a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon SOC, 8GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, a 1,520mAh battery, and a 5-megapixel backside-illuminated sensor paired to an f2.2 lens for camera duties. Its external design is intentionally tailored to match that of HTC’s 7-inch Flyer tablet, with one single aluminum shell wrapped around the electronics inside. The Radar will come in white and silver variants when it launches in October, a white and a silver option, though be forewarned that neither of them will have a user-replaceable battery. The particular physical design of this phone looks to have made that a necessary sacrifice.

HTC has informed us that it’s aiming to price the Radar somewhere below the typical $199 on-contract levy, however we’ve no word yet on which carriers will be picking the phone up when. Europe’s getting it in October, presumably right alongside its bigger brother, the Titan.

An HTC phone allegedly codenamed “Omega” has appeared on PocketNow this afternoon in some convincingly realistic press shots. It’s running Windows Phone -- which is convenient considering that Microsoft’s Mango release is coming right up -- and is said to feature a 3.8-inch display, 8-megapixel camera, 512MB of RAM, and a 1.5GHz Snapdragon MSM8255 processor. Qualcomm’s official specs for the MSM8255 only have it scaling up to 1.4GHz -- so either HTC’s pushing the envelope on the clock speed, it’s actually something lower like 1.4GHz, or the phone features a dual-core MSM8260 which does allow for 1.5GHz out of the box (the latter seems unlikely considering the middling display and RAM specs).

HTC has events planned for September 1st (we’ll be there), and it seems like the Omega is probably a lock to get announced there -- possibly as the “Radar,” PocketNow reports. With any luck, we should be looking at a couple months’ worth of interesting Windows Phone hardware coming up.