5500 vs 5600

[fsjws4]

I know the differences between the two units on paper, but I'm interested in personal experiences of the 5500 and 5600. Is there a significant speed difference? Which keyboard is better? Is there anything you can do with a 5600 that you can't with a 5500?

[tumnus]

I summed up most of the differences in this post, though I think the 5600's price has dropped since:
https://www.oesf.org/forums/inde...owtopic=582&hl=

The keyboards are almost identical, and if you get a PXA255 based 5600 or use the Special kernel with a PXA250 5600 then it will be faster than a 5500. There aren't any decent benchmarks for comparison however.

[xamindar]

I have a 5600 and my friend has a 5500.  Both are wonderful machines.  The 5500 has a better choice of roms if you want to customize it.  Though, both him and I have stuck with tthe Sharp rom because everything just seems to "work" well.  I do like the battery life of the 5600 a lot over his 5500, a big difference.  Only thing that annoys me is the buggy chip on the 5600.  It doesn't cause any problems but because of the workaround put into the kernel the 5600 runs about as fast as the 5500 or maybe even a bit slower.  The speed is only niticable if you watch movies on it or run console emulators.  Hope this helps, I am glad I stuck with the 5600.  It does all I want it to.

[tumnus]

I've had my 5500 for over 2 years now and my 5600 for nearly 1 year. Loading applications on the 5600 is slower than the 5500 because the 5600 uses slower non-volitile, flash ROM for internal storage, whereas the 5500 uses volitile RAM for internal storage.

Other than that, a 5600 running at 400MHz (either with the fixed CPU or the Special kernel) is faster than a 5500, but of course there are other speed bottlenecks which mean that the 5600 is no where near twice as fast as the 5500.