I ported one of our internal applications from x86 to iOS some time ago and whilst it wasn't entirely horrible it wasn't very fun either and some features were trimmed or dropped, Apple has pretty good support for a lot of things, more so than Android where I'm hoping a future NDK will allow a port there.

Whilst in the process of working on this and debugging I said numerous times "I wish phones were x86" because I think it would have made some aspects of this a lot easier.


So, for ARM to be relevant long-term in the desktop (and up) space I think porting experiences have to be less painful and expensive, it's a bit demoralizing to put in a lot of porting effort only to have a fairly cut-down product and tell IT to just buy more netbooks for now.

ARM (Cortex-A8, A4 chip) is slow (some CPU is needed for the diagnostic output processing). I didn't expect that. I expected that, but for some reason I didn't expect an iPad would be a lot slower than an Atom netbook, which in my experience are already pretty slow compared to a cheap non-atom notebook.

It seems for this stuff the iPad is definitely the way to go, but our code just isn't ready for it yet.