Newton Won't Die

Superman writes "Wired just published an article about the continuing popularity of the Apple Newton MessagePad, with props to Mad Max (a Newton MP3 Player), the new ATA driver, and Newton's 802.11 capabilities. Definitely an interesting read, and more proof that just because technology may be a little bit older, doesn't mean it's not useful." I still have my MP2000, and still think it has the best UI around. I keep meaning to convert it into a wireless MP3 player. I am currently hoping for Apple to make an iPod with AirPort and Rendezvous, though.

Comments

Inkwell

[feldsteins]

Good technology never dies I guess. I wonder if Apple is planning to fill the space left by the Newton. They can't be developing Inkwell for nothing can they?

Re:Inkwell

[painkillr]

Tablet PC's are kind of like a convertible. It should be your second car, not your first. Most families should have a beast of a desktop somewhere in the house but also have a more portable device that's good for lying around on the couch and watching tv at the same time or listening to the stereo.

A lot of people now recognize the utility of a PC and have more than one in their home. Usually one for them (and spouse maybe) and one for their kids. This type of demographic would probably be interested in something like a tablet PC just for screwing around and such.

In use at the Javits Convention Center

[Glass of Water]

At the last LinuxWorld Expo in New York, I noticed that every booth had a newton with a card reader attached to it, so they could swipe guests' badges and get a record of who visited their table. They must have had 100s of newtons.

Just another toy

[phorm]

Early models were bulky, expensive and bug-ridden. Apple marketed the Newton poorly, and it was widely ridiculed; a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.
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If a comic strip could "doom" something, then MS/Windows would be dead a long time ago. It seems that slashdot alone has a large amount of these linked from user comments.

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After shopping around, he found a machine that did it all: Web, e-mail, calendar and address book, but it could also recognize ordinary, cursive handwriting that wasn't as awkward as graffiti The biggest problem with a Newton is its size: It's as big as a brick. ----------- I had a nice little acer laptop that did all of that and more. It had a 233Mhz MMX processor. It ran windows 2000 decently on 80MB (max) of RAM, and was wonderful for Linux. Unfortunately it took a spike in a power surge, silly me for not getting a surge guard

Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.

It seems that handhelds are often just used as toys, with a cheap notebook at least you can run linux or do some programming

Re:Just another toy

[sphealey]

If a comic strip could "doom" something, then MS/Windows would be dead a long time ago. It seems that slashdot alone has a large amount of these linked from user comments.

Doonesbury may not be what it was in the 1970s, but it still has a slightly larger readership than Slashdot. By about 3 orders of magnitude!

The Newton was marketed as a "hip" device (as was the Palm) primarily for the "in" crowd. That one cartoon made the whole thing seem terminally absurd, and did in fact kill the entire product line.

sPh

Re:Just another toy

[DdJ]

Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.

Depends on what you want. I have an eMate, which is a Newton that's shaped like a laptop. I've charged it up, taken it with me to a 3-day conference, and used it to take notes at the conference for the full 3 days without ever having to charge it. I took it on a business trip to Europe, and didn't have to worry about getting an AC converter because I didn't have to plug it in the entire time I was there. Can you do that with your used mini-laptop?

Re:Just another toy

[RevAaron]

4 MB of RAM is enough for a Newton. On a computer with a non-traditional architecture, RAM doesn't mean the same thing as on your Win2k box. You don't need 80 MB of RAM on a Newton just to be able to connect to the net.

Nope, can't run Apache+PHP+mySQL. Someone could work on a port, but there wouldn't be much use in it. There does exist a web server for the Newton, including a framework for the creation of web applications; the NewtonScript language is built in; and there is an object database at the heart of Newton OS.

Yes, you can connect to/from the Newton using standard ethernet, serial (PPP/SLIP) or wireless connections.

I agree, no reason to look to other solutions, and I myself recently switched from the Newton to another platform. But, there's also no need to ignore the strengths of other solutions.

Display upgrades

[seanmeister]

You don't have to listen to your wireless MP3's on a Newton with a dim, old, scratched-up screen - a pal of mine has put together a display upgrade kit and is currently taking orders!

(sorry buddy!)

I'm not trolling

[wompser]

but seriously, if there is "news" that is remotely Apple related, Wired, is all over it. They love to report Apple news and culture, it tends to be of this type: Gee, Apple stopped doing X long ago, but look, these hip trendy, user groups are doing it themselves!!!! Yay Apple!

Don't believe me? Try this story or this story or this story

Or maybe I'm just missing something? Is there really a well dresses, over educated, hip Apple underground that I have never seen? Wired just tends to report these user groups and people as trendy, San Fran artist types. They have swallowed more than just a bite of Apple's marketing message. (bad pun, I know)

Kind of like Slashdot reports on Linux types... Think about it, it is easy to come up with stereotypes of Wired readers. And slashdot readers for that matter.

but I digress, I do think the Newtons are cool.

Any chance of someone else building them?

[burgburgburg]

Now that Apple has stopped development, is there any shot that they'd license them to be built by someone else?

Which begs the question, who'd be interested in building it?

Link to the comic

[Jippy_]

a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.

The Comic

=-Jippy

First generation PDA

[hey!]

It's easy to condemn something with 20-20 hindsight; but nobody had done anything like the Newton before.

How big exactly should the screen be? What resolution? How powerful a processor do people want? What things make a PDA succesful for day to day users?

There is no combination of answers that is right for every user. The Newton combination worked well for certain people. However, there were many other people who didn't need that much screen or processing power.

It did get a lot of things right, like superb battery life. On the other hand, one thing it got resoundingly wrong was connectivity. Connectivity worked OK on the Mac, but Windows utilities were always buggy and unreliable, and Apple had an indifferent attitude towards Windows users. So, you either had to be a Mac user or a tolerant Windows user to be pleased with the Newton's basic out of the box connectivity options.

The Newton screen size is a dividing point for users. Either you love it or you hate it. Most people prefer something you can slip into a shirt pocket and feels comfortable in one hand. Witness the move from clamshell PDAs to palm style form factors in WinCE. I know trying to sell users on my PDA apps, it was always a struggle with Newtons, but put a Palm in their hand and they immediately wanted it.

The Palm was a rare, perfect combination. Good battery life, large enough screen to do what most people wanted but not any larger; and excellent connectivity. By being less ambitious in the screen department than the Newton, and less ambitious in the connectivity department than WinCE, it could be smaller, simpler, more reliable and cheaper.

Re:Too big or not to beg

[RevAaron]

For a fairly wide range of usertypes, the Newton had the potential to be a desktop replacement. This excludes the kind of people who don't think that a laptop is a satisfactory desktop replacement, namely, 3D gamers. I'm not into that. The only reason I sold my Newton, and the only thing I couldn't do on it that I can on my desktop (er, well, it's an iBook) is program in Squeak. However, I can do this on my Jornada 720, at the expense of everything else working as nicely as it did on the Newton. With the proper knowledge of C and graphics work, I could've had Squeak running on the Newton, but even for that noble cause, having to deal with C for a big project didn't interest me.

Unlike the Palm and for the most part, PocketPC, the Newton didn't need to be teathered to the desktop to be useful. I never sync'd with a desktop, and never needed it to get data or applications. I was able to use a browser and FTP client via ethernet for those sorts of things, just like I would on the desktop. Apple's intent wasn't to completely replace the Mac- true, but it does a pretty good job at it. Most of the missing pieces that are in the work habits of other users could easily, in most cases I'd surmise, be solved by having an application or analog of one that just didn't exist on the Newton.

Again, this excludes hardcore 3D gamers- there is an OpenGL subset available on the Newton- but a 162 MHz StrongARM wouldn't cut it for Quake 3. :P

The screen is indeed big enough. By "big" I am talking physical dimensions, screensize. I could see why some people would like a larger resolution, but I did fine with 480x320.

For those things, I never wished I had a much larger screen. My girlfriend has a webpad with a 10" 1024x768 screen, and it's much too large to be comfortable for me.

I was a Newton user for a while, but I don't think it's fair to just dismiss stories of well it worked as just reality-distortion-tunneling of "Newton die-hards." My handwriting was (and still is) a big mess, and with the Newton, I was able to get 40-45+ WPM and around 99.4% accuracy. Sorry, but the days of Eat up Martha are long ago, and the Newton 2100 is not the Newton of 1993. Newton HWR *learns* as you correct it, so it works fine even with messy handwriting like mine.

The Newton has the size of screen of a legal-pad- obviously, people manage to use the paper version of those, do they not?