Windows Phone Mango minimum standard

Microsoft still has some guidelines for smartphone manufacturers, although standards for the WP 7.5 aren’t as strict as for WP 7.

Gyro and compass used to be considered mandatory, which is not the case anymore. This means that we won’t be seeing these two, truth be told quite handy features, in more affordable phones. The WP 7.5 standard allows for making a phone without a camera, whereas earlier the standard demanded a minimum 5MP camera on the back and a VGA one on the front.

Windows Phone 7.5 requires the following terms:

Standard hardware

• A common set of hardware controls and buttons that include the Start, Search, and Back buttons.
• A large WVGA (800 x 480) format display capable of rendering most web content in full-page width and displaying movies in widescreen.
• Capacitive 4-point multi-touch screens for quick, simple control of the phone and its features.
• Support for data connectivity using cellular networks and Wi-Fi.
• 256 MB (or more) of RAM and 8 GB (or more) of flash storage.
• A-GPS
• Accelerometer

Optional Hardware

• Compass
• Gyro
• Primary Camera
• Front-facing Camera

As far as CPUs go, all WP 7.5 based devices will have a single core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU and DX hardware with hardware acceleration for Direct3D. Microsoft dropped support for dual-core CPUs as it claims that the performance gain is not as high to justify shorter battery life.


Compas and Gyro on the Radar

HTC’s Radar has no gyro or compass. If you try to install a compass app, you’ll receive a warning identical or similar to the one on the picture below. Accelerometer is part of the phone, of course.

 
Specification for Radar and Titan

Both the Radar and Titan have the same resolution (480x800px), but the Titan has a 4.7’’ screen whereas Radar comes with a 3.8’’ one. We’re talking about the standard resolution for WP devices. Qualcomm’s single core MSM8255 CPU with Adreno 205 GPU comes on both HTC’s phones, with only difference being the clock speed (Radar at 1GHz, Titan at 1.5GHz).