One gigahertz in a shirt pocket: the first handhelds that do not wait
Three makers showed pocket machines this week that start in a second and run a day on two cells. We had all three on the bench.
What changed
Until this spring a handheld was a patient thing. The new chips draw a tenth of the power at rest, so the makers can spend the rest on speed.
- Start-up in under one second
- A full day on two ordinary cells
- A screen you can read in daylight
On the bench
We ran the same address book, the same map and the same long document on all three. The differences are small and the prices are not.
Running the test yourself
The bench script is in the archive. Copy it to the machine and start it with bench --all --quiet; it writes one line per test.