What you should expect from the new Windows Phone 7.5 Mango handsets

News · 6 Sep 2011 · MTW Editorial Team

I’ve been reading a lot of misguided comments lately following the unveiling of the HTC Radar and especially the HTC Titan. Things like “HTC should be ashamed to used a WVGA 4.7″ screen, the resolution is too low” or “It’s going to be more expensive that the Dual-Core HTC Sensation! HTC are cheap bastards for using the MSM8255 clocked @ 1.5GHZ” or “Waiting for the Mango version of the Samsung Galaxy S II”. Ring ring my beloved anonymous friends! HTC and all the other OEMs don’t have much control over what SoC is used, same for the screen resolution. You already know that if you’ve been closely following the platform since the beginning.

The MSM8255 @ 1.5GHZ is the fastest chipset you will find in the next gen of Windows Phone handset and 800×480 is the max/only resolution supported by the OS. As a matter of fact the HTC Titan is probably going to be the flagship Windows Phone product this fall alongside Samsung’s high-end handset in terms of overall specifications. So there’s no need to blame the OEMs for what some perceive as major shortcomings. I haven’t been a big fan of HTC’s offerings lately but the Titan (and also the Radar to a lesser extent) is frankly the best they could do with want Microsoft allows them to mess around with. Both are the company’s first handsets to feature brand new camera optics and sensors (28MM wide angle camera with F2.2 lens, dual LED flash, and BSI sensor), front facing cameras, DLNA, the best in terms of WVGA LCD screens (Super AMOLED Plus is so much nicer tho..) etc. Performance isn’t going to be any issue either thanks to Microsoft’s tight control of the platform.

You are now buying into an ecosystem (Android, WP7, iOS or RIM) and hardware specifications should no longer be the main decision factor when it’s time to choose what will be your best fit. As we have already seen; higher speced Android handsets can often struggle to be on par with the current Windows Phone (UX/UI performance wise) which are build for a fraction of their price. If you think about it wouldn’t surprise me if OEMs were going to make more money per WP7 device once the demand ramps up simply because they are probably cheaper to build (year old SoCs, less RAM but priced the same as high end Android handsets).

I do agree that it can somewhat be annoying to pay the same price for Dual-Core device on Android and a single-core Device on Windows Phone but this is the way it’s going to be. Similar to Apple’s products which are often not using the most powerful hardware components, you are now paying a premium for the better UX, ecosystem and tighter hardware integration. Feel free to comment, rant, cheer below.