HTC X7510 - something changed...

Introduction, packaging

There are all kinds of devices in the world of telecommunication, which can be categorized by all kinds of criteria. Basically we can say that there are good and bad handsets but this matter is much more complex. We can sort them by destination for example: handsets for the youth, business models, luxury items, prestige devices. These last ones are in my opinion are those that don’t have much practical use and the group of targeted users is small too, but the manufacturer’s still produce them but only to be able to say: we can do this too!

It’s not small...

I think that this has been the reason why HTC Advantage X7500 (distributed under the name Ameo by T-Mobile) has been launched a while back. According to this I would have never though that they will ever create a successor to that handset, and even less in the age of netbooks (Asus Eee and co.). No matter what we think the original (X7500) Advantage wanted to fill in the blank on the market which has been targeted by UMPCs too, but it has finally been accomplished by netbooks: it’s larger than a PDA, smaller than a notebook, so it’s portable, but this doesn’t affect usability. The only problem is that in terms of features Advantage was way far from notebooks as practically it has only been an oversized Pocket PC. Still, the successor is here with 16 GB of internal memory and a new keyboard at a price for which we could by a high-end PDA-phone combo and a fine netbook. The question remains unchanged: why? I have asked many professionals what they think this handset is good for. I have received only one usable answer: to put it on the desk at a meeting and amaze everyone else as they haven’t seen such a thing before. This is quite true I think.

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The handset, supplied by SpeedShop came in a huge box which contained a leather case, a carrying bag, a stereo headset, a charger, a data cable, a “lengthener” with TV-out and USB connectors and a backup stylus besides the phone itself. The pen-stylus combo is not included anymore as you can see.

Exterior

X7510 looks just like its predecessor, only that it’s black – the leather case is still brown, so it’s still quite different from the handset, at least I think so. It’s made of two parts: the phone itself and the QWERTY keyboard which is connected via magnets to the 133 x 98 x 16 mm large handset that weighs 375 grams. The materials used are great, the whole handset is made of metal, only the top part, around the camera is made of plastic but that’s great quality too although it’s a great fingerprint-magnet since it’s shiny.

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The keyboard can be attached in two ways: on the front in standby and to the bottom when used. In the first case the part behind the small Plexiglas is lit up, it displays current time and missed events, so it’s a kind of standby screen and it also protects the display.

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The most evident change is related to the keyboard. It has touch-sensitive keys and it has a vibrating engine too, so it gives small vibrations as a feedback for keypresses. It’s basically very easy to use, I think it’s better than the one on the predecessor, but the edges separating the keys are very small so we need lots of practice to be able to type blindly on it. Another problem is that it has no backlight. The magnetic attachment, however, is great, even more, it’s outstanding.

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On front of the handset we can see the VGA touchscreen with a diagonal of 5”, which has a fine quality, it has a great picture, the colors are bright and it can be read quite easily in sunlight too. There are three status LEDs above the display while on the right we can see the secondary camera used for video calls and the button that takes us to the Today screen. The small joystick is gone from the left, along with its two small buttons, even though they were useful.

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There is nothing on top, but on the left side there are lots of gadgets: volume control slider, handsfree speaker (one of them, as we have stereo sound), VGA/USB output (this is where we have to plug the cable), miniUSB (HTC ExtUSB) connector and 3.5 mm jack output.

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The keyboard’s connector is on the bottom part along with a cover that is above the miniUSB and the SIM card – the memory card can be hot-swapped. The power button is on the right, along with the other speaker, the camera’s exposure key and the silo of the stylus – the pen is quite small compared to the phone’s size, it’s made of transparent plastic, but basically it’s easy to use. On the back we can only see the reset button and the 3 megapixel autofocus camera.

Hardware, operating system

As the handset is made by the “give it all” principle, it has no problems with hardware. The OS is Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and the CPU is a Marvell PXA270 at 624 MHz and there is an ATI W2284 graphical acceleration chip too. RAM is 128 MB large and there is 256 MB of ROM, we have 77 MB free for running programs and 102 MB for storing data, but we have to add the 16 GB of flash memory to the latter one. If this wouldn’t be enough, we can expand storage space with a miniSD card.

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We have been testing the handset’s speed with the usual test software, which means Pocket PC Mark and VsBenchmark – fortunately both of them launched, although this is not very usual for the handsets we had for testing nowadays. I would like to note that X7510 is perfect in terms of software compatibility, I haven’t found one program that wouldn’t launch – okay there was one, but I’ll mention that at the GPS part… until then here are the benchmark results:

It’s hard to tell anything more than these numbers; the handset had some incredibly high scores at almost every test, practically the file system benchmark is the only exception, but it’s no weak at that either, it just had an average score. Fortunately the new Advantage is fast not only at the synthetic benchmarks, but in “real life” too, only scrolling in the Start menu was lagging a bit, but the launch and close of programs is lightning fast and this is the point.

Software, data transfer, GPS

The handset changed a lot in terms of software, even more if we compare it to T-Mobile Ameo. The reason for this is that it has the TouchFLO user interface installed, which provides “a bit” more refined look for the handset than the pink (oh, sorry: magenta) Today theme from T. It’s still very easy to use (I might even say that it’s easier to use than the new TouchFLO 3D), it has five screens, the first displays the missed events, the second is a speed dial, the third is a weather forecast plug-in, the fourth lets us launch our favorite programs easily while on the fifth one we can mute the handset and turn on/off keyboard vibration.

While browsing the menu we can see some fine stuff, like ClearVue Presenter 5, Comm Manager designed by HTC, Google Maps, JETCET Print that offers wireless printing, the remote desktop client, the RSS reader, Zip, WorldCard Mobile used for digitizing name cards and the latest version (9.5) of Opera Mobile which provides an outstanding browsing experience on the large screen.

Opera Mobile 9.5

The handset is not bad in terms of data transfer, the GSM module is quad-banded (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), we have GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and HSDPA support too, but the latter is only 1.8 Mbps. Bluetooth is of version 2.0, it supports A2DP and WiFi is 802.11b/g-compatible. We can use the miniUSB-compatible HTC ExtUSB connector for wired communication. I didn’t really try making phone calls with the handset, although we can do so with a Bluetooth headset – all services related to this are the default Windows ones, Outlook is still great, the phonebook’s capacity depends on the internal memory (so we can store an unlimited number of entries) and the email client supports authenticated IMAP servers and attachments too.

GoogleMaps

The handset has a GPS receiver, but no exact details are known about it. It’s sure that it finds position very fast with the help of QuickGPS and it’s also sure that the original iGO 8 won’t launch, it hangs up during launch, just like on Touch Pro. The reason for the error is a BMP file, at least according to the error message.

Multimedia

The camera has a resolution of 3 megapixels, autofocus and a LED flash. It’s a really strange feeling to take pictures with the handset, it’s not an everyday thing to see a live preview picture on 5 inches and it’s not the best thing to hold in hand. I must mention, however that focusing is lightning fast, even some compact cameras could be envious of this speed! The software has the usual settings: white balance, light metering (center weighted and matrix), JPEG compression (4 steps), exposure correction (+/- 2 EV in 0.5 steps). The list of features includes a self-timer, effects, panorama and image sequencing.

Image quality is quite fine for a PDA, although the handset tends to overexpose the pictures, as you can see above. In such cases the colors are of course not the best, but when a correct exposure is used we get really bright colors and edge sharpness is great too. Noise level and noise filtering are both reduced, so on the whole I’m okay with the handset’s photographical qualities.

We can play back our music with Audio Manager form HTC, which is much, much better than Media Player. Unfortunately this is not perfect either, as we can access the equalizer only with a plugged-in headset, which has a pretty good quality, it’s great for listening to music. The handsfree speakers are also good; they are extremely loud, even though at high volume there is a high amount of distortion. We cannot play back movies on the handset, the reason being the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system: the great TCPMP is not compatible with it, so no matter the ATI Imageon accelerator chip, the program just won’t launch on X7510. It’s a great thing, however, that there is TV-out and as I have already mentioned the cable is included in the package.

Other, summary

The battery has a capacity of 2100 mAh, which is huge, but we shouldn’t forget that the large display needs quite a lot of power in order to function. I wasn’t using the handset continuously, but in my experience I could browse the net for about 4-6 hours, depending on brightness and other factors.

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Summary: HTC Advantage X7510 currently costs about €940 EUR. For this we could buy fine netbook (for example an Eee 1000H or an MSI Wind) and a medium-expensive phone PDA (HP iPAQ 614c/914, or an HTC Touch Cruise) and I think that this says it all. HTC’s newcomer has not chance in the world of small notebooks, or it would have if it would cost half than its rivals, but instead it costs double. I just can’t see the potential buyers, so X7510 remains a gadget which deservers all our respect, but we won’t buy it.

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The handset has been provided by www.speedshop.hu, thanks. Please click here to access the shop.

Specifications

HTC Advantage X7510
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz UMTS/HSDPA 2100 MHz
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
	Size	133 x 98 x 16 mm
	Weight	375 g
	CPU	624MHz Marvell PXA270
	ROM/RAM	256 / 128MB (102 / 77 MB free) 16 GB flash memory
	Display	5” diagonal, 640 x 480 pixels resolution, 16 bits color depth touchscreen
	Expandability	miniSD
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	Infra / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	present
	Audio	3.5 mm jack output, microphone, stereo speakers
	Camera	3 megapixels, autofocus, LED flash + secondary (VGA) camera for video calls
	Battery	2100 mAh
	Other	Attachable QWERTY keyboard, HTC TouchFLO, TV-out