Windows Phone Thoughts: Working With An Advantage - The HTC Advantage 7510 That Is

Performance
The 7510 is powered by a PXA270 CPU running at 624 Mhz on a 32-bit data bus, and sports an ATI Graphic Chip W2284 as well.

Figure 16: The Device Info screen from the Advantage 7510.

That's a pretty powerful processing package and that, coupled with 128Mb of RAM and 256Mb of Flash Memory (in addition to the 16Gb discussed earlier) you'd expect snappy performance. Well, not exactly. While the Advantage worked reasonably well, screen-to-screen transitions weren't always as quick as I've come to expect on smaller PDAs and the 7510 really dragged when it had five or six applications running simultaneously. I suspect a lot of the CPU power and the graphics chip are taken up in managing the large VGA display. Unfortunately, the Spb Benchmarks bear out these observations.

Figure 17: Overall benchmark results for the 7510. It's probably not fair to compare to the original iPAQ 3600, since there have been significant changes in the O/S since this was started, but if you look at the comparisons to the other VGA-based units (M700, X51v), it doesn't do too bad.

Figure 18: Here, you can clearly see the advantage of the more powerful CPU. The separate graphics processor in the 7510 may have also helped out here.


Figure 19: Hmmm, not exactly sure what happened here. I would have expected better performance with the graphics processor, but this reflects what I saw when I tested viewing of various videos on the 7510.

Figure 20: Wow... what difference! Clearly, this is where the dedicated graphics processor took over.

Figure 21: Compressing a file, using mainly the CPU, the 7510 did relatively well, but not stellar, especially when its processor is much faster than the X51v and the TyTNII.

Figure 22: Similar to the compression test, here we kind of expect better performance from the 7510's faster processor.

Figure 23: Again, ignoring the iPAQ comparison because of O/S changes, the 7510 doesn't do too badly compared to similar units.

Figure 24: Again, a real surprise here. I certainly would not have expected the TyTNII to come out on top, especially considering all the controversy surrounding imbedded graphics chips with no (or disabled) drivers. Maybe it came out on top because it's only QVGA? I would have expected a much better result from the 7510.

My overall feeling was that the Advantage 'lagged' a bit. It wasn't quite as snappy as my TyTNII (Kaiser), but then again, I'm running a custom-built ROM (thanks, XDA Developers!).

The unit comes with a graphics chip/accelerator, which should improve the display, especially when viewing videos. I tested it (very unscientifically) by viewing trailers from various sources, such as VideoDetective.com and compared the results to my TyTNII (Kaiser). Visually, the Advantage had a better look to the video (bigger screen helps) but the frame-by-frame flow looked the same, if not a bit blockier than the TyTNII. As you can see above, this is confirmed by the Spb Benchmark tests.

The 7510 is powered by a massive 2100 mAh Li-ion polymer battery which should give amazing usage right? Again, not quite. It takes about 4 hours to fully recharge the battery on a wall charger from absolutely dead, which isn't too bad – roughly the same as many of the laptop batteries. I tried running the unit in what I thought would be a fairly normal operating mode for someone working away from the office. I put the screen on continuously at low to medium intensity, made 2 or 3 phone calls, turned off the bluetooth and GPS and ran the basic PIM (Calendar, Contacts, To Do's, etc.) functions on and off during the day. After about 6 hours, the battery was a 20% and the O/S was reminding me to do something about it. Not exactly the 5 to 6 hours of talk time and 300 hours standby claimed by HTC, but to be fair, their times are with the screen off. And 6 hours of screen on access to email, etc. is still a good deal longer than you'll get from most laptop batteries.