Winform on CF is a bit heavy, initialising a lot of windows handles takes serious time and memory. Another issue is the lack of inbuilt double buffering and lack of control you have over the UI rendering means that during processor intensive operations the UI might leave the user staring at a half rendered screen. Nice!
To alleviate this issue I would seek a lightweight control framework, is there one kicking about already or would one have to homebrew?
By lightweight I mean a control library that enables one to fully control painting of controls and doesn't use many expensive windows handles.
NOTE: Please don't suggest that I am running too much on the UI thread. That is not the case.
I ran across this the other day, which might be helpful at least as a starting point: Fuild - Windows Mobile .NET Touch Controls. The look and feel is nice, but there is no design time support. I don't know too much about memory footprint, etc but everything is double buffered and the performance appears to be pretty good.