I was unable to justify the added cost of a smartphone plan, and didn't expect the price to get down to a reasonable range for several more years, if ever. But I recently found that Virgin Mobile US offers unlimited data/text and 300 minutes of voice for $25/mo, without being tied to a contract. This is a much better deal than anything else I've found in the US (it's less than what many of my friends pay for their dumbphone contract), and was enough to finally bring me into the smartphone world. They have two Android phones right now - the Intercept and the newly-released Optimus V. Neither one is a top-of-the-line phone, but the Optimus is particularly impressive for the price.

I think it's unlikely that Perl is being used for any of the heavy computations. I would guess that Perl is being used as a glue language that interfaces with the database and programs written in lower-level languages to do the heavy lifting.

I tend to have the opposite experience. When I need to use it, IE7 is quite fast and responsive for me, and it will certainly open tabs as quickly as I can hit Ctrl-T. On the other hand, Firefox (on any computer I've used) occasionally has a bit of a delay when opening new tabs, especially if other pages are rendering in the background, you have a few complex sites (like gmail) open, or you have more than 3-4 tabs open.

There are a bunch of great reasons to use Firefox - adblock, keyword bookmarks, decent standards support, Firebug, etc. But in my experience (especially post-1.5), the responsiveness of the UI is not one of those reasons.