Slashdot Mirror
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?"
The goal here is not just being able to run decade-old apps from the Newton. It is extending what was so good about the Newton to new platforms. No pda has yet to come close to the best features of the Newton. Furthermore, palm os has stagnated, and there are lots of gadgets, from cell phones to "internet tablets" appearing that run on linux that are crying out for better user interfaces (especially decent handwriting recognition). Check out http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthrea d.php?p=7287#post7287 over on the Nokia 770 forum as an example of how this might play out.
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...
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.