I get your point according speed and performance but it was a big difference back in the days when these devices were brandnew. They represent a technology of the nineties and that was a very different approach.
Today the mobile hardware is highly standardized and the technology is saturated since a few years. Nothing new to expect and the only reason for a new generation of processors is higher speed and higher performance. Else there would be no need for a new processor
Back in the days the technology was "never seen before" and was defined by the hardware because the software was not so powerful
(and limited by the low performance processors
).
So if you wanted new features you had to buy new chips
(as a manufacturer
) or a new device
(as a consumer
). This was the time when the today usual 24 months mobile contract was invented. Every two years you got a new phone from your provider and every two years the manufacturer came out with a completely different idea what a cellphone should do and how it has to look and to perform.
These were thrilling times and we
(as early adopters
) had a new technology in our hands every two years.
Today this technology is saturated and the phone from three years ago looks exactly the same as the actual one and it uses exactly the same software. New features are only software on the existing powerful hardware.
So to talk about USB. USB 1 was represented by some special hardware inside the device. It was no good idea to burden the main cpu with that
(as it is today with the system-on-a-chip
). So the USB-controller was connected to the main external data bus of the device and that was the bottleneck. The data are coming slower to the USBcontroller than the maximal USB-speed could have used. USB and the Jornada was mainly an advertising feature and for those folks who had some spare USB-ports in their Pentium-desktops.
The 560 has a different design approach. The supporting hardware for the chip is completely different. These are by no means "systems-on-a-chip" like todays Mediatek-processor. Back then you needed a whole supporting chipset, mainboard layout and peripherals to build a system and every manufacturer could have come up with his own ideas for that. The "processor" was just a micropocressor and you needed bus-layout, memory, clock control from external chips.
With this freedom to design the whole system
(and the burden to do it
) there are endless possibilities and that is the reason why there is no linear path in overall performance to see back than.
There were only a few manufacturers in that area of expertise. Today every chinese layouter can buy a development-kit from Mediatek and with a few capacitors
(cannot be integrated
), a cam and maybe some transceivers he can build his phone. This is the reason for the hundreds of chinese phones from small companies you never heard of. Back in the days that was an impossible task to solve without the big business background.
The emulators I know are all crap. Mainly to show that it is possible but not really useful, sorry
