HTC X7510 Advantage Review

Performance:

Even though we mentioned that Advantage’s idea is not to be used as a main phone, it would be good to be able to make calls with it, right? If there’s an incoming call, there’s not a chance you won’t realize it, despite the fact that there is no vibration. The original Windows melody is so loud that you cannot miss it.

Forget about the built-in loudspeaker during a call: you hear well if located in a quiet area, but the collocutor will not hear you in most cases and your voice will be choppy. You’ll get better results with the phone right next to your head; but even without the keyboard and the case the Advantage is extremely big.

The results are also very good if you use the ear set included in the package or a Bluetooth handsfree, but you’ll have to constantly either wear a fully charged earpiece or to untangle the cables of the earphones. Even in these situations, in case you want to make a call you’ll have to pull out the Advantage since it doesn’t have a decent voice dial. Instead of an intelligent speaker-independent system, you’ll have a simple voice dialing after you have previously recorded a tag for each contact, which is a slow and inconvenient operation.

The battery performed well when using the phone for a main one and when being an assistant. Even if it is slightly inconvenient, we recommend switching off the Wi-Fi when you don’t need it.


Conclusion:

It’s hard to rate such a device: some will like it a lot and it could replace their portable computers in some situations, but it will be useless for others. There really is a lot of memory, the user is able to write long texts (messages, documents) with the user-friendly keyboard, the browser is very good (for a mobile device) and the display is decent, but overall, the system is limited and not good enough.

According to us, the inability to play videos and the somehow mediocre document performance (Excel, PowerPoint) is a serious drawback for such a device. If the price and the size were smaller, it would be OK, but they are comparable to a UMPC, which works on Windows XP or Vista and offers the performance of a mobile computer, which are definitely “years ahead” of the ones, offered by a Windows Mobile phone. Our opinion is that for most of the people who need a mobile assistant, Advantage is not going to be a good solution and an ultra mobile computer would do a much better job.