Windows Phone Thoughts: Asus a730: Reports of the Death of Its Performance Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

"I received the a730 a few weeks back and I immediately tested out the graphics and benchmarks because I, like the rest of you, have heard rumors of it being slow. My initial findings were looking grim. It was performing slow, very slow, and it didn't quite make sense to me. So I got talking with Dan East of Pocket Quake, as well as Picard of Beta Player. With the help of these two developers, we found the main cause for the Asus a730's slow speeds. It had to do with a poorly optimized dll which converts the 320x240 code to display on the a730's VGA screen (pixel doubling). Picard had sent me a dll to try on the a730 which had some better optimized formulas for the conversion. After benchmarking in quake and spb before and after this new dll, I seen significant gains (roughly 5 fps in quake)"

Matt Keys over at PocketMatrix has been playing with a Asus a730 "final production unit" for a few weeks now and has seen problems with it's display speed. Happily Asus responded immediately after being sent details of the fix and the current a730 performance is significantly improved. Matt is withholding his final judgement until he sees a final "final production unit" :wink: , but so far he is impressed with the device and says that it has a lot of potential. Problems with complex devices like PPCs are bound to occur and it is really good to see Asus being so responsive and on the ball. Now if only the other PPC manufactures were willing to react to user feedback (let alone quickly). Oh well, we can hope, can’t we?