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Comment by mwcampbell

11 years ago

You say it's not worth cloning, but what about the touchscreen phone UI running on an 11 MHz ARM processor? What was the secret sauce that made that work? Or was it just that a phone UI back then wasn't expected to do as much as one does today?

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mwcampbell

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david-given  11 years ago

Partly lowered expectations; it was a monochrome stylus screen with about four pixels. Partly it was the hand-tooled and very lightweight libraries. We could run the translator in both online and offline mode, so most of the Java runtime was pretranslated into machine code and in ROM, which minimised startup time (although the generated code was the same, so there was no difference in performance). Partly it was an earlier, more^H^H^H^Hless elegant age of Java; this was the MIDP era.

Ah, here it is:

http://www.fano.co.uk/history/phone.html

Mmm. I don't remember it being quite that brick-like.