Some things never change…especially not if we are talking about the servants of the Orange orb. Their famous Tungsten T handheld shipped with a TI OMAP processor which also contained an extremely powerful DSP – and was never used in any applications.
Engadget now reports that the QualComm chipset used in the Pixi is similar:
…including one dedicated 600MHz applications processor, and a separate 400MHz modem processor to offload some of the heavy lifting. Otherwise, the phone is said to pack a 200MHz, OpenGL 2.0-supporting GPU for some decent gaming capabilities, and a 320MHz application DSP to handle multimedia
…
Has Palm borked up again?
Fortunately, the situation is less miserable this time due to a property of the webOS: its apps are platform independent and cannot access hardware directly. This makes life easier for Palm: if they optimize the VM to use some DSP hardware, apps which use these parts of the VM benefit automatically.
However, the situation isn’t perfect. Palm now has two boxen with almost completely different hardware on the market: this likely means loads of extra work for developers.
Keep in mind that user perception of application quality depends heavily on response times – if the two handsets respond completely different, you need to test on both…
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