HTC Radar, launched in October 2011, was one of the first HTC smartphones to run on Windows Phone 7.5 and now the handset will get the Windows Phone 7.8 update in India.

The software update (v7.10.8862.144) for the HTC Radar started rolling out back in January 2013 in some countries and now Indian customers can install the update. Windows Phone 7.8 brings several new features and bug fixes to the HTC Radar. However, the handset doesn't have the Bluetooth file transfer feature that is available in Nokia Lumia devices.

The idea of the Windows Phone 7.8 is to bridge the gap between Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8. The key new feature in Windows Phone 7.8 is the updated Start screen, with support for three resizable tiles. In addition, the number of accent colors has been doubled to 20.

The software update will also allow the lock screen of a device to offer support for automatically using the Bing picture of the day as the background. Even though the software update will bring many new features to the HTC Radar, the update will not bring all features which Nokia Lumia handsets get after updating to Windows Phone 7.8.

The idea of the update is to make Windows Phone 7.5 users feel that their handset is new and fresh. The update may also keep current Windows Phone users from switching to another mobile OS once their current contract expires.

The HTC Radar has a 3.8-inch S-LCD capacitive touchscreen with 800 x 480 pixels resolution and 246 pixels per inch (ppi). A single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 MSM8255 clocked at 1.0 GHz powers the handset.

The HTC Radar is equipped with a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 0.3-megapixel VGA front-facing camera. The handset has 8GB of on-board storage and does not have the option to expand the memory using a microSD card.

Have you received the Windows Phone 7.8 update on your HTC Radar?