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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 you don't mind, allow me (a former Newton developer, and current computer science professor) to provide a slightly more informed take on the situation.
The reason everyone in the Newton community is excited about the emulator is not that it enables us to revive our Newtons, but that it gives us an easy migration mechanism. Newton owners have been frustrated as hell with the god-awful interfaces running on current PDAs. PalmOS is astonishingly profoundly primitive. And PocketPC is just about the worst interface I have ever seen on a platform. Generally it takes about twice to three times as many pen interactions to get a given action performed on the PocketPC as it does on the Newton.
I've used them all. A lot. And the Newton 2.1 OS is hands down the best PDA interface. And let's not kid ourselves: there still isn't a handwriting recognition system available that's as good as Rosetta. And the Newton UI is built around handwriting as a text entry mechanism along with a keyboard, unlike Palm and WinCE's traditional (and bad) character-entry-only event mechanism. And the Newton is fast. The MessagePad 2000 ran on a 167MHz StrongARM (predecessor to the XScale) in 1997.
So Newton users are stuck with a great but aging OS trapped inside hardware that is breaking down and falling apart. Most of us have FrankenNewtons at this stage. What the emulator will do is allow us to move our environments to a new PDA and still be able to use our old software, data, and UI, while using the new PDA's OS for new things. That's a big deal.
Plus, I might add, Einstein makes for a nice development environment.