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NewtonOS Running on Linux PDA
Seb Payne writes "At the WWNC 2006, Adam Tow has reported that Einstein, the NewtonOS emulator is now working on a Sharp Zaurus Linux PDA, showing future for our favourite green friend. Although it is not production quality, could this bring a future to the Newton platform?"
If apple brought the Newt back ( updated of course, and a bit more reasonably priced ) you would find lots of people would flock to buy them.
Not that i expect that ever to happen, but there is a market for the 'father' of the PDA to return too.
if you doubt me, ever try to find a used Newt? They still bring a relatively high price, as they are well loved by their owners.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, off the top of my head, picture a single hand-held platform that offers a free development environment with a choice of a few relatively modern (in at least two cases, solidly object-oriented; I'm not familiar enough with the other available languages to comment on them though) programming languages; support for direct wired ethernet; support for Bluetooth; support for 802.11b (and I think these days 802.11g); various techy sorts of apps like Telnet in addition to the more typical hand-held fare like address books, notepads, spreadsheets, and e-mail (and it actually has the best such client I've seen on a hand-held device); a word processor good enough that people have actually used it to write novels; a keyboard option that can actually be used for touch-typing but which is still portable; a decent graphing calculator; a full graphical web browser; a basic AI interface that can turn commands like "call Darren" into a sequence that'll actually dial your brother's telephone number, placing in all the appropriate prefixes / area codes / etc. for your current location; a free-form text-edit system that works (the early versions were rough -- the MP2000 & 2100 were both solid); a fast RISC processor that still gets excellent battery life; a grayscale display with enough resolution to be useful; Unicode support; it goes on. All of the regular add-ons for hand-helds like astronomy software, interactive fiction software, etc. are also available for the Newton.
That's just a quick list. Sure, you can get lots of these things in other packages, but you can't get them all in one package except on a Newton.
If you were to ask me on a different day I'd probably come up with a completely different list... and I'm sure other Newton users will come up with additional items that I overlooked at the moment.
The big thing is the convenience of this combination with a rock-solid multi-tasking OS in a portable form-factor. It's a little hard to explain to someone who's never used such a thing. All the same reasons that people are buying and using tablets today support the Newton, although the Newton tends to be smaller and lighter than most tablets, and never crashes...
Write text directly on the screen where you want it.
Draw a diagram under the text. Have the Newton automatically clean up your circles, rectangles and lines into vector graphics.
Write some more directly under that. Select the text and have your handwriting converted to text.
One gesture to start a new page.
In other words, the thing the Newton did which no other PDA has achieved that I've seen, is act enough like a notepad that you can actually use it for taking notes.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Another nice feature is the delete. To delete something on the Newton, you scribble it out. This is far, far more intuitive than any other system I've seen. You can also, as I recall, draw a circle around a group of shapes you've just drawn, and then drag them somewhere else. Oh, and it even recognised arrow heads on lines you drew when converting them to vectors...
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I think people who don't actually know much/anything about the Newton are missing the point here.
Of course the Newton is not "coming back". Its fate was sealed when Apple shut it down but refused to sell the technology.
But at the Newton conference yesterday one speaker said, "I've been trying to replace my Newton for almost ten years now." The audience agreed. But the design philosophies behind the Newton (continued in Mac OS X) have kept it ahead of unambitious crap like the moribund Palm OS (talk about dead--*that* OS sure won't remain in use for a decade after it gets discontinued). And in these intervening years Newtons have remained in service and the data on these things has even continued to accumulate.
Is the Newton coming back? No, it is not. But what Einstein means is that it may be able to STAY AROUND for a couple (several?) more years until the industry can come up with something good enough to actually replace it fro the people still using them.
It's cool to be able to emulate old systems
Actually, it wasn't so much the CPU power, but the lack of available memory to store a large enough dictionary for the recognition engine. The early versions had a 10,000 word dictionary. The later versions increased this to 93,000 words. This, coupled with faster processors and a new recognition engine are what enabled the MessagePad 2100 to have a quite usable experience--but it was primarily the larger dictionary that did the trick.