Why is it so slow ?

[Nicola Mfb]

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Nicola Mfb<nicola.mfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Omar Belkhodja<omar.belkhodja at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello Guys,
>>
>> I've purchased recently a new freerunner, and I'm really surprised
>> until about the slowlyness of the interface. Comparing it to an
>> iphone, the GUI is really very slow, using Android, or openmoko
>> distribution. Could anyone explain why and if this will be ever better
>> one day (more software optimizations...)
>
> The concept here seems to be relative, may you try hackable:1 and
> report if you feel it slow?

Now the long answer:

Freerunner is not only a smartphone, it's a revolutionary object that
waked up a lot of peoples to achieve the idea of a linux based free
phone.
You may think it as a not so fast device that show the "reference
implementation" of what is going in that direction.
For that reason software is in a "quick prototype" phase and to have a
fast grow, a lot of developers adopted python and in general prefers
ideas instead of waste time in performance issues.
For the same reason you may see a lot of small tools instead of a big
and memory resident and fast phone application.
Again for the same reason you see, in the case of SHR for example,
python apps interacting with python ophonekitd, interacting with
python framework.
This phase is quite terminating and things are going to be faster with
migration to c, vala etc.
E toolkits (or at least how them are used) seem not target the
Freerunner, but I think it's better to have them slow than boring
authors to use faster but "not future" toolkits.
We cannot stop this if we want the next linux open and faster device
be modern and compete with other proprietary devices.
That's the real reason that bring me to say "slow it's relative".

If you want, you may use some "legacy" fast solutions as QtE where the
"prototyping" phase has terminated some times ago :)

Regards

     Nicola