Speed differences between Wizard and Tornado?

[Guest jcostantino]

I have a thread in the Wizard forum about my MDA's poor battery performance and screwy LCD display. I've since boxed the whole thing up to send back for an exchange. Hopefully this replacement MDA will have a better LCD and battery life.

Here's my question: Why is the MDA so much slower than my 2125 and why is it eating so much power? Is Smartphone OS that much faster than Windows Mobile? I have a Cingular 2125 (Tornado platform) and the MDA (Wizard platform) and they both have the same amount of RAM, same resolution (different size, obviously) LCD, same type and speed CPU... Things seem to take AGES to draw if I have more than one or two apps open. Even the base OS is slow in things like Calendar and Tasks.

I was overclocking it to 220mhz which REALLY woke it up but I stopped that today to determine if the overclocking was drawing too much power. I've had my 2125 overclocked to 240 mhz with TPC for many months and it doesn't consume much more power than usual. The program I was using on the MDA scaled the speed in relation to the cpu load so the majority of the time it wasn't overclocked because it was idling.

Can someone tell me how long I should expect to be able to work in "PDA Mode"? Like I said in the other thread, I made some phone calls, put some reminders in and browsed the web for 5-7 minutes - maybe 40 minutes worth of use over 6 hours - and it burned through almost half the battery.

I've tried turning off BT, I always have wifi off, I've tried turning the brightness down all the way. I have a couple apps which go out to the internet for things (RSS and weather) but the battery isn't consumed when in standby, only when the display is on and the device is in use.

I'm hoping that the screwy LCD was causing it to draw too much power or I just got a bad battery, or both.

Any opinions are welcome... I really like the phone despite how thick it is but if the performance is going to be so-so compared to my SmartPhone and the battery is going to run down to nothing with brief use causing me to need an extended run battery which would add even MORE thickness to the phone - this isn't going to be a very good experience.

Edited October 6, 2006 by jcostantino