Re: OS5 vs. OS5

[Ben Combee]

At 09:34 PM 11/30/2002 -0500, you wrote:

        Just an FYI.. I was at CompUSA today doing a pretty in-depth test of
the Tungsten-T and the Sony NX70U/V OS5 handhelds, and I noticed something
very curious.. the are not quite running the same OS. They are both branded
as OS5 devices, but the Sony device was missing some libraries Palm has,
that I thought would be onboard. Two of these libraries should concern us;
CompressionPng and CompressionZLib. These both appear on Palm's OS5 device
(in ROM), but do not appear on Sony's OS5 device (in ROM or RAM).

Some of these things are Palm OS 5.1 features that Palm adopted for their device but that Sony did not.

The other thing I noticed, was that the NX70 was *MUCH* faster than
the Tungsten device, incredibly noticable when run side by side. Since
neither would run the Plucker I had on my m505 when beamed across, I
couldn't test the rendering speeds of each on some pretty complicated
documents I have here, I was only using some other tools I had on my Palm to
test the loading/execution/unload speed. Sony is clearly 30-50% faster in
this category.

I've seen similar results. PACE makes very good use of the cache that's part of the XScale chip, so its 68K emulation is a bit faster. On pure ARM-based OS code, I don't notice much difference between the devices, and testing ARMlets on both devices has shown that the XScale can be hurt severely by poorly optimized memory access, while the OMAP with its ARM9 core seems to handle random code execution fairly well.

        I personally think the Tungsten is a dead-fish. I would never buy
one. Instead of going for a larger screen, and virtualizing graffiti, they
opted for a smaller form factor, and compressed the body of the handheld.
There is no high-resolution mode (i.e. small icons, virtual graffiti, etc.)
on the Tungsten as on the Sony and Handera models. The only thing really
going for it is the onboard Bluetooth and brighter screen (than the m505,
but the screen is identical to the m515).

I actually use my TT far more than my NX70V. The size, the better integration of the OS, the buttons and 5-way navigator, its use of SD/MMC over Memory Stick, and the fact that it supports USB debugging are all factors in favor of it, IMO.

--
Ben Combee
Techwood Broadcasting Foundation, Austin Bureau Chief

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