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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?"
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...