How did kobo write such slow software?

So i'm pretty bamboozled by this.

Currently it takes 25 seconds to close a specific HTML file (a few hundred K, only 5000 odd lines) on the kobo glo - which is a 1Ghz cpu. Attrocious. (and the fact it hard-locks the machine whilst doing it is even worse, haven't they heard of threads?)

The only way I can think is that they did something really dumb like:

array[] all_lines;
while (line = remove_first_element_shifting_the_rest_up(all_line s)) {
free(line);
}

Despite using Java, which is supposedly 'slow' (it isn't, although tbh the arm implementation isn't as efficient as x86), my experiments are:
- faster start up time
- much much more responsive to touches
- never misses finger motions
- quicker rendering
- etc.

Whereas the kobo touch/glo is:
- slow as a wet week in almost every single operation, even pressing a button is slow

After another 12 months I would have expected it to be really amazing - the hardware is really very very competent, and the CPU is many times faster than the eink display can possible keep up with.

It makes their product feel like rubbish, but it's not the hardware's fault.