Amazing as it may seem, handheld devices may work in overclock.  Since they use a processor, it is possible to configure their processor to operate at a higher operation frequency than the standard one, increasing their perfomance. Today's tip, however, only works with models from Palm.

To overclock of your Palm, first you will have to install HackMaster, an utility that allows running low level utilities. HackMaster is available at http://www.daggerware.com/hackmstr.htm.

After installing HackMaster, you have some options of overclock programs, like FastCPU (http://www.getjar.com/products/1019/FastCPU) and AfterBurner (http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?prodID=7429). Using either of those programs will allow you to increase the clock of your Palm processor. We remind you that the overclock is a procedure that may or may not work, and that we give no warranty that it will in your equipment.  An overclock being successful is a matter of pure luck. Besides, the overclock may cause abnormal behavior in your equipment, for which we take no responsibility.  Do the overclock at your own risk!  If, after doing the overclock, your Palm stops working, you will have to perfom a reset.

If you don't want to take any risks in the overclock, there is another very interesting solution:  QuickBits. That program speeds up your Palm without doing the overclock, optimizing its common operations. According to its developer, QuickBits may make your Palm up to eight times faster.  You may download that program from http://www.2bitsoftware.com/QuickBits.

Measuring Your Palm Performance

After doing the Palm overclock or installing QuickBits you will be curious to see the performance gains.  For that, you will need to use performance measurement programs (benchmarks). 

PocketMark, for instance, carries out five types of performance tests: IntMark (a processor performance test), MemMark (a memory interface efficiency test), FloatMark (a mathematical performance test), DBMark (a writing and sorting performance test), and GraphMark (a graphic performance test).  You may download that program from http://web.tiscalinet.it/fcarello/files/pm021.zip. To work, that program requires the installation of MathLib (http://www.radiks.net/~rhuebner/mathlib.zip). 

Another excellent program to measure your Palm performance is Benchmark 2.0. That program may be downloaded from http://www.quartus.net/products/benchmark.