Also, if you develop for, say, the Apple Watch, there's a goldmine in looking at classic console games and how they made use of constrained resolution, memory, colors.
I feel like mobile developers and the creators of the hardware have given up on heavy optimization to work on minimal hardware and instead just gone with more expensive, top of the line hardware so they can continue current programming practices.
Yet my phone battery used to last a week and now it doesn't even last a day. Mobile CPUs may be able to handle all that bloated code fast enough, but not long enough.
When your phone battery lasted a week, what did you do on your phone, compared to what you do on it now? If I leave my laptop on standby the battery lasts at least 3-4 days, but if I use it continuously it lasts under 7 hours. Similarly with my smartphone, if I leave it on standby I get 2-3 days, but with "normal" usage - (moderate browsing, emails, texts, phonecalls) I have to charge it either daily or every other day.
I would imagine the limitations would make the UI design itself very effective aswell. Every extra sprite you include bears a serious performance cost so you would pare things down to whats absolutely necessary
It's interesting how much this page relies on the browser behavior of rendering all animated GIFs on the page in sync with each other, such that the palettes rotate in sync with the images.
Also, if you develop for, say, the Apple Watch, there's a goldmine in looking at classic console games and how they made use of constrained resolution, memory, colors.