a new ultimate in mobile power ;)

looks awesome. What do you think is better? The Dell Axim 400MHZ or this new Palm?

I think the Tungsten-C will flop, and here's why:

The xScale processor has a horrible overhead, and doesn't really "double" the performance of the earlier 206MHz StrongARM processors (in PPC's), so I doubt it will run Palm OS and it's apps (most coded for the DragonBallZ processors, and others for that TI OMAP).

Palm got a taste of the PPC world when they released the Tungsten-T (which I own, along with iPAQ 3635); to that end, rather than focusing on the new processor, they come out with yet another one.

Developers will not appreciate this, users will not see dramatic performance gains, either. I evaluated a 400MHz xScale PPC unit, and BARELY noticed performance increases against the 206MHz sARM. However, my wife owns the Palm m515 and I can see a CONSIDERABLE performance gain with the Tungsten-T (which is selling very well).

Palm had so many FLOPS until the Tungsten-T/W that most people are used to looking elsewhere. Bless 'em for trying, though, I just don't see an xScale Palm device making a big impact (like the xScale PPC's failed to do). More Chipzilla dogma to swallow for the masses.

-myrkat

Well, that isn't exactly true. There are several reasons why the pocketpcs are not seeing a large performance gain when switching from the arm to the xscale.

1. The OS is not optimized for the XScale. This is mainly a concern with memory allocation, which you will notice performs very poorly (and I will hit this again in another part).
2. The bus speed of the pocketpc remained the same for the first gen Xscales (100mhz). The newer (so far only the e755, which is the pda I recomend) pocketpc's will/do have a 200mhz bus capibility.
3. Recently Intel has revised the Xscale (it is now the PXA255 vs the older PXA250) which adds a bit to the performance of them (an extra frame per second in quake, which is quite a lot considering it is a jump from about 8.7 to 10.3)
4. Most importantly, however, is that Microsoft, in their infinate wisdom disabled the ability of the processor to write to its cache. What kind of performance gain would you see if it could, well there is a performance hack being worked on that adds this ability, and using quake as an example again, you get about 9.7 fps (on high res, the previous results were on portrait res (or low)) vs. 5.3 (typical). This is almost a double in performace, and I personly feel that quake is a good estimate of real work performance since it tests ints, floats, screen refreshes, input, and memory moves at a rather demanding rate.

Also important to note that the version of linux for the pocketpc already has the cache writting avalible.

Just thought that I would shed some insight on the situation since I consider myself rather knowledgable about pda's.

Also, another key feature of the Xscale, and this is the main reason why it was adopted by the pocketpcs is its ability to conserve battery life. It uses about half the battery life that the arm used, which is why I can't believe that palm would put an arm in their pdas, but they did it with the tungsten.

can't wait until sony comes out w/ one similar to the Tungsten C... but i bet it'll be like 700 to 800 bucks!

Actually, the model that will do better than the Tungsten-C is the Zire 71. Sure, they all laughed at the Zire, but it did grab 13% (or more) of the PDA market over the holiday season (spanking Sony and then some).

The Zire71 has a built-in (and crappy, but hey) digital camera, the 320x320, the joypad-thing (a la Tungsten) and is only $300 list... they'll probably come down to mid $200's or so.

THAT is what will push Palm up again, like the Tungsten-T and Zire did. I'm not sure people are going to go for the tiny keyboard (at least not if they have normal-size hands). It's a nice idea, but isn't ideal for most people.

Keep an eye on that Zire 71, though...

-myrkat