Dr. Awab Alvi is a very well known man in the blogging industry and also the political world of today. He is the founder of TeethMaestro, a blog I’ve been following since 2007. He is also one of the most prominent orthodontists of Pakistan. Faisal Kapadia, no not the singer from Strings, is the author of the book “The Sands Of Time” and also a new media writer for a lot of big names including Dawn and many others.

Now why is a tech blog talking about political activists and journalists? Because Pakistan Blog Awards 2011 happened and left a slew of issues behind. And since we were a part of the Blog Awards, I feel like I should have a say in this debate.

The Issue: The News?

The problem began as soon as the “Best Current Affairs” category award was given to “The News”. The site is also called “ZaViews AKA The News” (goodness grief), hence a lot of people of this category were first shocked as to how a blog that wasn’t even nominated could win the entire category! Turned out, the blog was indeed nominated but with a different name, hence “ZaViews”.

Okay So ZaViews Won, What’s The Problem?

The problem is, Pakistan Blog Awards gave the award to someone who actually shouldn’t even be nominated according to PBA’s guidelines in point number 5, which reads:

Submitted blogs and posts should contain the necessary authorization to use the images, audio, text and other content.

Now when I first visited ZaViews, I thought “Ok this is an up and coming blog which could very well be big in the future, a change of theme here, a domain name there, and you have a winner”. But upon further inspection of the articles posted on the blog, I saw that every post is copied from someone else. Being a blogger for over 5 years now, I despise plagiarism and everything that relates to it. This is the ONE AND ONLY reason why I think this blog shouldn’t even be nominated, because it spreads plagiarized content. It is against the ethics of blogging and is an act that can’t be done shamelessly.

About Faisal’s Remark

Faisal Kapadia makes a point in the debate, he says the blog “ZaViews” has had a total of 19,000 views. I agree it is a very weak number. But it’s not about that, the Blog Awards was not merely based on views and ranking. Had it been based on that, I wouldn’t even have submitted TechDeville, we get around 4000 views per day, but compared to RedmondPie none of the blogs get more views or are ranked better than them. Had it been merely about numbers and ranks, a huge number of blogs wouldn’t even be interested in the event. This was about bringing out the new talent, people who deserved to be recognized. I pay immense attention to the content TechDeville has because I don’t want to be responsible of making another “copy paste blog”.

TechDeville Won Dude, Why Are You Even Talking Right Now?

Because I’m not talking about just one part of our community. Our blogging community is huge and is growing by the minute. But we definitely can not support any blog or website that solely promotes plagiarized material. CIO, PC World, Google, these are BIG names, and such names can not associate themselves with a “spam” blog. Speaking from experience, Google has an endless list of very strict rules against such blogs, which is a good thing. I side with Faisal Kapadia, but not because ZaViews has had 19000 views, but because it is a blog running on someone else’ work.

If you talk about ethics, content is king. PakTeaHouse has a plethora of original content which was unjustly ignored by the judges’ panel. Everyone makes mistakes, but they should at least answer to the questions and criticism, not from the sore losers but from the real genuine winners who never got the award they deserved. Yasser Latif, the co-editor of PTH, wrote an open letter to CIO and PC World, which is still unanswered. The letter poses straightforward questions towards the “ZaViews Incident”. You can read it here.

Is PBA Wrong For Doing This?

For giving the award to a copy paste blog when there are so many other good blogs, yes. For bringing something totally new and different for the youth, no. Everyone makes mistakes, I applaud CIO and PC World for arranging such an extravagant event and give us Pakistani Bloggers something to look forward to every year. I am sure there is a reasonable explanation as to why “ZaViews” won.

All of these people arguing and taking part in hating PBA don’t understand one fact, there was no such platform for bloggers before. No awards, no appreciation, none of it was brought forward by any of these so called “haters”. No one is putting a gun to their heads to nominate in the blog awards. PBA should grow, better and stronger. But they should answer the question regarding “ZaViews”.

The HTC Radar initially leaked as the Omega was revealed officially back in September along with the HTC Titan as HTC’s first wave of Windows Phone Mango smartphones and is the first smartphone in the US to be released with Windows Phone Mango. The HTC Radar is sort of an updated HTC Trophy packing the same 1GHz clock speed, 3.8-inch Super LCD screen, RAM, memory and 5MP camera resolution. The main difference is the addition of a VGA front facing camera support of which was freshly added in Mango. So how good is HTC’s latest Mango packed offering? Full review is below.

Box

The HTC Radar comes inside a very compact white box which contains only a microUSB cable and wallcharger along with the phone, yes there are no earphones packed with the phone but you might have some extra ones lying around which you can connect to the Radar’s 3.5mm headphone jack. Warranty information and the standard instruction booklets are also present.

Specifications

The HTC Radar features the following specifications:
* 3.8″ 16M-color capacitive WVGA Super LCD
* Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
* Dual-band 3G with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps)
* Windows Phone 7 (Mango) OS
* 1GHz Scorpion CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, Snapdragon chipset
* 512MB RAM
* 5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash with geotagging, panorama and burst shots
* 720p video recording @ 30fps
* 8GB of built-in storage
* Standard 3.5mm audio jack
* Standard microUSB port (charging)
* Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
* Wi-Fi b/g/n
* Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
* Accelerometer for screen auto rotation
* Office document editor
* Facebook integration and cloud services
* Built-in A-GPS receiver
* Stereo FM Radio with RDS
* Comes with HTC Hub and other exclusive HTC apps

Hardware

The HTC Radar is not a hardware powerhouse as you might have expected from a second generation Windows Phone device, thankfully Windows Phone is much more hardware optimized unlike Android so you don’t need dual core processors to have a smooth experience. In fact the HTC Radar’s specifications are pretty much the same as HTC’s first generation Windows Phone handsets featuring a 1GHz Snapdragon MSM8255 and Adreno 205 GPU with 512MB of RAM along with 8GB of storage which unfortunately is not expandable with a memory card. HTC’s latest offering packs a 3.8-inch Super LCD which looks very good with Windows Phone’s minimalistic UI, the display run at the Windows Phone standard 480×800 resolution and supports four point multitouch.

The back camera houses a 5MP shooter with LED flash which takes very good pictures, there’s also a VGA camera on the front which is pretty much useless right now since there is no video calling application available for Windows Phone at the moment. Other features include the usual WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, A-GPS, standard microUSB port, 1520mAh battery and the aforementioned 3.5mm jack but unfortunately there is no Digital Compass without which you cannot use applications like Navigon.

The HTC Radar measures in at 61.5 x 120.5 x 10.9 and weighs about 137 grams. The HTC Radar comes in two different colors, Active White which we have here and Metal Silver. The Radar has an Aluminum Unibody design much like many of the other HTC phones, unlike the others though the Radar’s battery is not removable.

On the left side of the phone we have just the microUSB connector, I don’t know about you guys but I prefer having my connectors on either the top or bottom of the phone, having them on the side just feels… awkward. On the right side we have the volume rocker and camera button which are comfortable to press. The top of the phone house the usual 3.5mm headphone jack and power button.

At the bottom of the phone we have a white rubber cover which houses the SIM card, the cover has been reported to be inconsistent in some units and doesn’t fit perfectly (shown in image below) so you may want to test the phone before buying. The back cover when removed shuts the phone off which ensures that the SIM is safely removed. The upper back of the phone has the 5MP camera and LED flash along with the speakers which are pretty decent to say the least.

The camera has impress me a whole lot, HTC is famed for coupling sub-par cameras with their devices but that’s definitely not the case here. The camera’s f2.2 aperture lens and brand new illuminated sensor makes this one of the better camera phones in the market although there is still room for improvements. The camera records at a resolution of 1280 x 720 at a super smooth 30fps and the quality is pretty decent so we’re pretty impressed.

Software

We’re reviewing a carrier unlocked HTC Radar so there is no carrier bloatware at all but yours may vary. HTC itself installs a couple of applications including HTC Hub, HTC Watch, Notes and Photo Enhancer. There is also a DLNA app called Connected Media which I found pretty helpful, do note that the app will only play videos from your media servers who’s codecs it supports. The camera includes two new options namely Burst Shot and Panoramic Shot.

Now onto something which impressed me a whole lot and that is the battery life. I had a hands-on experience with the phone almost a month ago at Mobilink’s HTC Radar launch event where Brightex head Naeem Tabish informed us that the phone lasted him around two days, he was not lying. On heavy use our Radar survived for around 30 hours which included WiFi always on, gaming, downloading applications, browsing, listening to music and watching videos. We then tried out the handy battery saver application which made the phone last for a whooping 45 hours!

Conclusion

The HTC Radar can be defined in one word: brilliant. HTC has created a great mid range smartphone which will definitely be turning heads. The phone is in no way perfect though; the flash memory is limited to just 8GB and not expandable, the battery is not removable and the camera is limited to 5MP which in this day and age is considered average but if you’re not a power user this shouldn’t affect you at all. If you are a power user then you should grab one of those newer Android phones with ridiculous hardware, Windows Phone is for people who just want to get the job done.

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