Just FYI, my game ran at 30-32 fps on a IPaq 36xx; but on the Toshiba e740, I was seeing 3-5 fps. Well, the biggest culprit was my FrameCounter.
I was just doing the basic GDI GetDC, DrawText, ReleaseDC stuff with PocketFrog surfaces, but that was sucking up a huge amount of the framerate.
Digby says that the GDI should work at acceptable speeds, so I think the problem was interaction between PocketFrog surfaces, and the GDI itself. (anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, after taking out the FrameCounter (now it just dumps framedata to a file at the end of the game), the game runs at about 14-16 fps.
Blitting does take up some of the remaining speed (if I don't blit, I can get 25fps), and I'm working on changing my local copy of the blit function to try to wrench some more frames out of it. And that's where I am now.
Digby has been extremely helpful. Thanks!
If anybody else has had similar experiences, or has tips on how to improve e740 performance, gimmie a shout. I'm hoping to use this as my standard programming platform, since I really do think x-scale chips will start to dominate the industry soon.