Say sorry to the fan.Eager to get your hands on the newly revamped HTC Advantage 7510? You’re going to have to resort to the gray market, at least for the time being. HTC has decided not to distribute the new “handset” in America. So sad. Truth be told, we’re not entirely sold on the redesign, with an altered keyboard design that appears to leave a little to be desired in the ergonomics department. The reason for the ban is that the handset runs off of the Qualcomm chipset that has been banned in the US pending litigation. As there hasn’t been much progress on the chipset ban, we won’t hold our breath for an impending 7510 release stateside.About HTC Advantage 7510

HTC announced an updated version of the device, also called the HTC Advantage (now this will cause some confusion), that sports a new HTC Home Today screen, future version of Windows Mobile (let’s make the obvious guess that it will be 6.1 shall we?) HTC TouchFLO support Opera Mobile 9.x (announcement made last week), 16GB of internal storage (Flash this time!), new and improved keyboard, and updated VueFLO that recognizes device orientation and flips the screen to match. The updated model still includes Marvell PXA270 624MHz and Qualcomm MSM 6275 processors, 256MB ROM, 128MB RAM, tri-band HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, 5-inch VGA, and 3 megapixel camera. The battery has slightly less capacity (2100 mAh vs. the 2200 mAh of today’s model, but with the flash drive instead of a spinning hard drive I doubt there will be any difference (and maybe even better life) in this new model.

I hope HTC has one of these here at MWC08 to play with since I really need to check out that new keyboard design as that and the mobile browser are the only real weaknesses I personally see in the current HTC Advantage device. In looking at the photos, the keyboard buttons seem larger, closer spaced, and modeled similar to other HTC devices like the TyTN II/Kaiser. It would be very nice if this keyboard could somehow be backlit, but I’ll try to find this out too. This latest model, the X7510, should be available in Europe starting in March.

UPDATE: I visited the T-Mobile booth and found the 16GB Ameo in operation. The short video below takes a quick look at it and the photos show a close-up of the keyboard. It is much flatter than I imagined, but it does have a short vibration if you press the key. It is hard to say if it is any better than the current keyboard and I wouldn’t worry about upgrading if you already own one. The rep said it was running the next version of Windows Mobile too.