Palm manufacturers are too slow. They could have easily released a 66 MHz Palm device (which would be the first Palm to match the earliest Win CE devices...) by now, based on Dragonball, but they're too lazy and/or stupid. The Palm manufacturers will probably take until 2003 (if they are very quick) to release an ARM-based Palm.
Oh! Can your Palm install a 180 GB SCSI (external)hard-drive? Or how about a Toshiba 5 GB PCMCIA hard-drive?
There is no way that the Clie can have comparable video playback as the Pocket PC. The movies they play are probably only barely compressed! Sure, I could make an old Nokia cellphone play video if I programmed the ROM with one big animated sprite!
Serious Sam is a big feat for the Palm developers. You can't just take some source code and compile it for a Palm! You have a totally different environment. The OS doesn't have support for much RAM, so you must make all the textures tiny. The cpu is not an easy one to program complex stuff for, either.
What makes any of you think that the Palm OS on the ARM will be faster than Pocket PC on ARM? The main reason that Palm was able to so (relatively) efficiently use its cpu for simple applications was because it was non-multitasking and non-multithreading. That's also why Palm is a little bit more stable in the applications. Well, if Palm OS 5 is anything like what it is advertised to be, it will not be any more efficient than the PPC, except that maybe it will not use ClearText, which will save about 5 microseconds for Palm.
It seems to me that Palm OS 5 will be much less stable than previous versions of Palm OS. They say themselves that many previous apps will play slowly, or not at all, on Palm OS 5.
Serious Sam is not any sort of proof that Palm is anywhere close to the Pocket PC in multimedia, neither is the Clie's ability to play movies or mp3s. The mp3 capability is only because of hardware mp3 decoding, and the sound in the movies is only available if you have an audio adapter attached or if you have a Clie with built-in mp3. That is obvious, of course, since Palms have no real sound capability (other than beeps) in the actual Palm device (the audio and mp3 hardware is just set to be able to be controlled by the Palm OS, not actually part of it). The video is 8-bit color at best (it looks worse than that) and is max 160 x 120 resolution. 15 max fps is optional, but only 10 fps is actually acheiveable. The sound in the movie player is only capable of using either the audio formats supported by the Audio Adapter ( PCM/ADPCM mono) or the proprietary Atrac3 (stereo or mono) for the Clie N7XXC series, which means that no sound processing actually takes place on the actual Palm device. This doesn't seem that impressive to me. Heck, the GBA has a better movie player (I've heard that the Matrix trailer had been ported, with sound and fullscreen). If you could play a movie that has 16-bit color or if you could play sound by emulating a real wave sound with the beep-speaker or if you could play at a higher resolution than 160x120, then that would be cool, but guess what? You can't with a Palm. What is available for movies on the Palm is only in ratio to the actual cpu abilities. 160x120 is 1/4 the size of a PPC screen and 10 fps is half of what is often available for fullscreen playback on Pocket Divx for the iPAQ. That adds up to about 1/8 the performance for video. And that isn't even really compressed on the Palm, and the PPC also has to actually decode mp3 format sound (using software) for the divx files. Besides, the Palm isn't displaying 16-bit color for the videos. This doesn't seem very proportional for the cpu speed of the Palm. Keep in mind that this is a proprietary video codec designed and encoded specifically for the Palm. The Palm has a 33MHz cpu, right? Well, if it takes a Palm to have a 33 MHz dragonball processor to do what a 26 MHz StrongARM (206/8) PPC could do, then why does this mean that, according to what some of you say, Palm is more efficient? Palm is in fact less efficient in doing multimedia (efficiency = graphics capability / MHz). Think about it! I installed the gMovie video maker on my PC to see what you can do and I also read the different pdf files about it, so I know what I am talking about. Also, I play divx movies and movie clips on my iPAQ all the time.
That Palms, MHz for MHz, are faster is a myth that I wish to dispel.
Indeed, "Palm Pilots are the Pet Rocks of the portable computing world", as Dan East said.
