I buy them in packs of 3-5 on ebay for $5-10. (no need to buy the really expensive brands) They are quick to replace, have a nice oleophobic coating on them, and can be replaced as frequently as desired.
The mid to late xscale era got very weird. Between the 90s and early 2000s handheld processors were growing in leaps and bounds. At the height in 2004 devices like the Dell x50v were shipping with 624mhz xscale chips with a dedicated GPU with 16MB of VRAM. Then they just stumbled. Later devices dropped the maximum clock speed, dropped the dGPU, even dropped the screen resolution from 640x480 to 320x240.
I had a Dell Axim (not sure of the spec), I'm pretty sure Dell gave it away for buying a couple Dell branded printers or something like that. I also had an HP iPaq which was pretty similar (I also think I got Linux running on that one somehow).
It could do a few fairly impressive things, like running emulators as you mentioned. But I think the problem with those was Windows Mobile or Windows CE or whatever they called it at the time. The touchscreens stunk as well.
It was just a crappy scaled-down version of Windows. It was missing the ability to run actual Windows software. It had a browser and a serviceable camera (it helped fulfill my eBay addiction at the time), but it wasn't the same as browsing on a PC.
It probably still wouldn't have been ideal, but within another 2-3 generations it would have been improved/faster and then 'good enough', just like the early iPhones.
I also had an ipaq ~2003. It didn't have enough storage to be a reasonable music or movie player for commutes and (mine anyways) only had wifi via a honking PCMCIA adapter that drained the battery in no time, so I otherwise browsed the web with a laptop. No websites were anywhere near designed for small screens in those days, either.
You're right that the OS was garbage, further limiting the already limited hardware. I think I also got linux or BSD running and messed around with some WEP cracking in my neighbourhood for a bit, but then it otherwise sat in a drawer.
I was still in school and it was a stupid and expensive purchase, but it did teach me to only get new tech if it was actually useful and otherwise wait, which as served me well since, including the iphone (which the first one was barely adequate for what it promised).
You didn't just get a storage card? Between an SD card and a CF microdrive I kept a ton of media on my pocket PC. Most of the ones that came out in 2003 and onwards had bluetooth and wifi built in.
Wait! I had the x51v! That’s probably why I loved it so much. With the two batteries and stand to charge them both. (Or was it three?) I can understand the desire to get one for nostalgia.
For some reason my strongest memory is using it in the dentists office.
My previous device had been a Sony Clie peg-tg50/u (which in some ways was great, but lacking built in WiFi… however I used to save web pages on my laptop and put them on it to read later). But that once fell out of my pocket on a lawn tractor, went through the blades, came out with some nicks but was otherwise fine.
I have fond memories of worms and an rts on that. (The stylus was both great and horrible for that ).
In memory what really was just amazing to me at the time: great fast mp3 player(better on the Sony)
The ability to play videos.
On the dell, the web browser probably wasn’t great, but in my memory I still remembering thinking it was the bees knees. My laptop at the time was a Toshiba Satellite with a pentium 4, 512mbs of ram, and a 16mb GeForce card. Which to me, was pretty darn amazing. (Except for its tendency to every 6-8 months become unable to boot suddenly, needing windows to be reinstalled from Toshibas 4(?) re install discs on an increasingly broken disc drive. This of course was partially more frustrating due to my limited computer skills at that time… which were more comfortable overclocking AMD K6-2s with jumper settings)
Yeah those NAV buttons drove me nuts. Such a wart on an otherwise great upgrade. Wm5 had one handed navigation and you didn't have to worry about a dead battery wiping your applications.
That's been Google phones even since the Nexus days. They review super well then three months after release there's some crazy-ass hardware problem no phone has ever experienced before. Screen discoloration, glass backs cracking while laying flat on a table, power buttons getting stuck, spontaneous camera glass cracking, etc.
The flaws were much more excusable with the Nexus phones since they were dirt cheap, but the price of the Pixels has crept upwards and now they're more or less at parity with Apple and Samsungs flagship prices.
I don't know why but tech industry folks tend to be very resistant to the stupendous complexity of biological systems. The way biology builds functionality into structure can result in incredible space efficiency. Like neurons, for example. People assume the computational aspect of a neuron is only a tiny part of the structure of a neuron, when we have no reason to believe that. That is to say, people think you can equal its ability with a model many orders of magnitude less complex than a neuron. They don't want to think about the implications of that assumption being wrong.
I always find myself coming back to the dragonfly brain. A dragonfly brain needs exactly sixteen neurons to take input from the 30,000 ommatidia in its eyes, use that information to plot the three-dimensional flight path of airborne prey, compute an intercept course, and send those signals to the wing muscles.
How many transistors do we need for that? Input from 30,000 camera pixels, tracking moving objects in 3D space, computing vectors. Now you have a neuron to transistor efficiency ratio. Now multiply that by 86 billion. One brain. AGI's gonna take a hot minute, folks.
I don't know why, but certain people tend to be very resistant to the stupendous power of information systems. One such information system, the dragonfly brain, is amazing, and another such information system, the human brain, may never be sufficient to understand it... in the raw. But it is a proven fact that human brains can build tools and other information systems.
Take that DJI drone. For the sake of argument, let's assume it took 300 000 years to develop: that's for how long we know anatomically modern humans have been around. We could reduce it to 10000 years, to account only for modern estates and concentration of resources in such quality that people get time to do science, invent new things, and imprint all of that in the web of human culture (another information system). Anyhow, humans have developed a thing that flies and has a camera, and the two things are connected, in 300000 years. Insects evolved 2.6 billion years after life appeared on Earth. Is the DJI drone not as amazing as the dragonfly? And if not, but we keep making new versions of it for the next 1000 years, will it be able to catch up to the dragonfly?
Tons of websites say this but in my own testing during my commute the difference is almost unnoticeable, let alone a full 25%.
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