Arstechnica has posted an article entitled The Palm Pre's possible Achilles heel: battery life. In it, they talk about the how the screen, cellular radio and beefy cpu may drain the Pre's batter faster than its competitors. The most interesting part of the article, though, is about how the webOS software stack may be more computationally expensive than because of its reliance on web standard languages such as HTML and JavaScript:
Performing some common operations in JavaScript, such as string concatenation, can be a lot more computationally intensive than doing it with native code. On top of that, programs that are built with Web-based technologies are going to rely on DOM manipulation to control the user interface, which will take more processing power than using a conventional native widget toolkit.
Web runtimes are increasingly viewed as a more portable alternative to native development, and there are some emerging standards and existing mobile implementations that show a lot of potential in this area, but the technology is extremely resource-intensive; it doesn't really scale well enough to be used pervasively on conventional handsets. The Pre's Cortex A8 will certainly help make the software environment fit into a mobile, but the combination of the processor and the software stack could make for a big drain on battery life.
Head on over for the full article.
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