HTC Radar vs Nokia Lumia 710

With devices at all price points, there hasn't been a better time to dip your toes and try out Windows Phone. Today I will comparing the HTC Radar and the Nokia Lumia 710, both the lowest priced Windows Phone 7.5 Mango smartphones both either manufacturers. Both are priced at around £200 sim-free, but can be had for much less when bought on pay as you go. You can read my in-depth review of the Lumia 710 here and of the Radar here.

Both of these devices are second generation WP7 smartphones, meaning they are shipped with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and comes with Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon S2 System-on-Chip (SoC) with Adreno 205 GPU. The Lumia 710's Scorpion ARMv7 CPU is clocked at a higher 1.4GHz speed, whilst the Radar is clocked at a more modest 1GHz. While it may seem like the Lumia 710 has a speed advantage here, Windows Phone 7 is so well optimised the speed difference isn't that apparent apart from certain areas like web browsing. Still the Lumia 710 is likely to be in a better position to take advantage of Windows Phone 8 Apollo, assuming of course that the OS is made available to either devices.