I think there is definitely something wrong with my first PE. The new one is at least 20-30% faster than the old one. I can tell a definite substantial difference in how fast it operates - even the graphics are quicker and smoother.
An example is the GIN RUMMY game I was talking about. When moving cards around with the stylus (and during the dealing animations) they used to be very 'jumpy' and would refresh their position maybe 3-4 times a second. On the new PE it's very smooth and has a much less choppy animation to it. Also the weird 'touchscreen position' glitch is also gone now! YAY! Also I've spent several hours playing with it and not one app has crashed or closed unexpected on me. It just seems to work!
Keep in mind this isn't exactly comparing apples to apples. I had the 1.01.001 Ermine update installed on the first one. The replacement is still running the 1.6 Dingo as I haven't updated it yet. To be honest I'm starting to question the reliability of the Ermine update that was released by Entourage. Either that or the addition of the GAPPS included with the 1.01.001 update really slow things down. To be honest since this one will be used by my G/F for E-Reading and light surfing (and solitaire) I don't think I'm going to bother to update it now.
When I get mine from 1saleaday I'll play with it some more.
*On an only semi-related note I installed a really fun game called Air Control (Lite) where you have to guide airplanes to the proper runways without letting them collide. It's a lot of fun but the game has two options that come in handy. The first is the option to display FPS (Frames Per Second). The Second is to turn Video Hardware Acceleration on or off. Typically games go faster when you turn ON Hardware Acceleration however the reverse is true with this game. Turned ON it gets very choppy and only yields 3-5 FPS. Turned OFF the game gets extremely smooth and yields 40-50FPS (which drops to 15-20FPS while drawing the paths for the planes).
This shows me two interesting things. First, the FPS never exceeds 50 so assuming it uses some kind of V-Sync that tells me the screen refresh rate is probably 50Hz. Second it shows me that the video chip doesn't much like hardware acceleration and probably a big reason why games work poorly with the PE is because of this fact. If they are told to always use hardware acceleration that would explain a lot. Unfortunately most games don't have the option to turn this off. Maybe there's a way to go into a configuration file and do this manually?
Just something for you linux/droid guys to ponder...
Clink on the image for a link to the download of the Free Version of Air Control from Amazon Apps
