Porta-Squeak

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Wed Apr 2 23:02:59 UTC 2003


Wrt a $199 Zaurus SL-5500 plus Squeak:

They had this deal a week or so back on their website.  Apparently, you
can still get the item at this price over the phone, but it is no longer
on the website at this price- at least last time I checked.

I was quick enough to get one of them- at the low, low price of $169.
There is/was a 15% coupon off anything for new customers at
www.dealnews.com, so it may be worth checking that site out to see if the
coupon code still is valid.

I bought one of these puppies largely for runing Squeak.  And boy am I
ever happy with it- it runs Squeak a lot faster than both my iPAQ 3150 and
Jornada 720! I imagine a lot of people who are doing Squeaking on a PDA
are using some model of iPAQ.  I am not sure where the speed difference
comes from- the SL-5500 has very similar specs to both the iPAQ 3150 and
the Jornada 720- but it scores a good 20-25% faster in the tinyBenchmarks
than both the iPAQ and the J720 do under the latest WinCE VMs.  I am using
the Tommy's DirectDB VM on the Zaurus.  Not only is there better
performance with these simple benchmarks- the Z *feels* a lot snappier
than both of my WinCE machines do running Squeak.  I don't really know how
to quantify this, but the speed difference is quite noticable, especially
by a person who does a lot of work on Squeak+Morphic on these 206 MHz
StrongARM devices.

I may sound a bit like a salesman, but I bought the Zaurus expecting
something that ran Squeak about as well as the iPAQ, and am darn near
ecstatic at how it turned out. :)

(If anyone wants my Jornada 720 for Squeak use, send mean email- I'd be
willing to cut a cheaper-than-eBay deal.  It is still an awesome little
machine, and has a really great keyboard!)

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "the end of the human race will be that it will eventually
      die of civilization. "                          :: r. w. emerson




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