Your comment would make sense if EFL/E17 did not already support OpenGL ES on embedded devices. Illume, the E17 variant designed for mobile/embedded devices, already runs quite well with hardware/OpenGL acceleration on platforms like Maemo, and I already have built and successfully run EFL-based OpenGL apps on the Palm Pre (available in the WebOS Internals WIDK tree).

Evas was designed from the ground up to be modular and support every graphics platform known to man. Windows GDI, DirectX, iPhone OS, X11, WebOS, native Linux Framebuffer, SDL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES - you name it, EFL runs on it. Evas will take advantage of hardware acceleration when it is available, but benchmarks actually show that in many instances, when it comes to regular UI graphics operations, OpenGL/hardware accelerated interfaces don't necessarily perform better than Evas' own software engine and in several cases are actually worse -- on the Palm Pre, for example, GLES is actually much slower at doing things like alpha blending. So in that respect, yes, hardware does have some catching up to do.

Actually the Pre's homebrew is very different from iPhone jailbreaking and is not even a "hack" anymore. For one, it does not void your warranty. Two, you don't have to circumvent any vendor restrictions to do it, and you don't even have to get root access to your phone to install homebrew apps -- all you have to do is download the novacom component from Palm's web site and a handy app installer utility. In fact, once you've installed the "Preware" app you can install homebrew apps directly to your phone OTA. Apps that start off in the homebrew catalog actually end up graduating to the "official" app catalog once they satisfy Palm's vetting requirements -- e.g. the excellent gDial Pro Google Voice app. Palm's attitude towards homebrew is very, very different from Apple's attitude towards jailbreakers.

Also, you're wrong about OS updates -- the way Palm has opened things up, it would be virtually impossible to disable homebrew without also killing off all public access to the SDK and pretty much breaking everything. Homebrew is pretty much here to stay.

One day I made the fateful decision of buying an ATI X800GTO graphics card from Newegg.com. Cursed be that day, may it burn in hell forever. That card has been the bane of my existence ever since. My stubborn self, ever determined to find solutions to problems at whatever cost, toiled for hours, days, weeks and months trying to get it to work right.

It never did. When I finally managed to get ATI's Beelzebub driver (aka fglrx) to do DRI, it would make this continual high pitched demonic whir, flicker horribly and report frame rates of 4800fps. Serpentine piece of evil. And it burned like hell too -- the fan would spin so hard, and it would get so hot, I became genuinely worried about a spontaneous conflagration. I had no better luck with the open source driver, but at least it didn't threaten to send me into bankruptcy over electric bills.

At one time I went back to Newegg and bought an NVIDIA card, from their bargain basement. That one worked OK from the get go (NVIDIA's drivers are lovely), but it had this annoying habit of freezing up hard about 20 minutes after I started playing a video game. For some reason (a temporary bout of stupidity, perhaps?) I never made the connection -- until one day it died for good.

I eventually bought a new NVIDIA card. Not from Newegg, this time. So far it has treated me well. But it will never convince me otherwise: Video cards are the evil spawn of darkness. Especially ATI cards. I hate them with all of my being.

My rant ends here.

For a toy, it has been fun to use so far. Of course this is just with locations I know. The truth in the end is that there's room for a lot of improvement. Alas, for something that is free, it is pretty sweet.