[fidotron]

Less obvious than some of the embedded things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

x86 (and licensed derivatives) were a thing in more custom handhelds like the Psion Series 3, and games systems like the Wonderswan. The variants made by NEC alone were: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20#Variants_and_success...

[tengwar2]

The Psions could do execute-in-place, including for third party software on ROM SSD - i.e. they did not have any fundamental distinction between working memory and disk storage.

[usr1106]

Yes, NOR flash was common in these kind of devices and phones until maybe 2005 or so. So you could run code without loading it to RAM first. However, I believe RAM was still needed for stacks and heaps. Writing them to NOR flash sounds too slow.

[tengwar2]

No, I really do mean that they used the disks as ROM. No writing to it. This worked because you can just put the stack and heap at a difference position in the memory map from the executable code.