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Comment by ano-ther | Hacker News Reader

Looks snappier from how I remember my PalmPilot

Another comment mentions it, but it is PalmOS 5, which already ran on ARM devices. Some of them 400MHz+ ARM chips like various Intel XScale models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Tungsten

So I imagine it was already pretty snappy on those devices. I think the RP2040 might be a downgrade in comparison...the clock speed at least, is much lower.

Yes, it was quite snappy. I used to play mp3 files on my T3 with the processor scaled down to 133MHz no problems

T3 was a beauty.

Granted I got into them well after the two Pilot models (I think a Palm III was my first, followed by a V, and then an m515) but they were always very responsive. Far more then a m68k processor running at 20 mhz had any right to feel.

My first was a Vx (OS 3.5 iirc) and that was really snappy and overall a great ux compared to other handheld devices I have had. But after that I had two different Tungstens (OS 5.x) and those felt far slower and had much worse battery life and I did not like those as much even if they had color screens and more features.

> Far more then a m68k processor running at 20 mhz had any right to feel.

The Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500 ran on a 7.09 (PAL) or 7.16 (NTSC) 68000 starting out with 256 KB (not MB) ram for the 1000, 512 KB for the 500. With this they ran a pre-emptive multitasking single-user OS which was partly ROM-based, partly loaded from floppy. These were responsive systems as long as they did not need to pull data from floppy drives.

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