Newton II - Does The Rumor Have Legs This Time?

Ian Lamont writes "Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld has an interesting analysis of the small computing market, and predicts that the market is primed to take off. He admits that small computers have been tried before and failed ('Every single UMPC device that has been shipped or announced suffers from lousy usability, high prices, poor performance, ill-conceived user interfaces, or any combination of the above') but he points to several recent products — and a rumor — that he says changes the playing field and paves the way for the first-ever successful small computer, from Apple. The products are the iPhone and the iPod touch. The rumor: Apple Insider has sources who claim that Apple is actually working on a 'modern day Newton' to be released in the first half of 2008. The device will supposedly have a version of Mac OS X Leopard and a touch interface, according to Apple Insider. A lot of people just aren't buying it. They point to the fact that the first Newton eventually flopped. A few note that similar Newton II rumors have been trotted out in years past, as well as a high-profile hoax. Nothing ever came of them." Would you buy if the Newton came back?

Comments

Re:Newton is already back, it's called the iPhone

[feranick]

In the Newton you could actually add apps, or even simply edit documents. Amazingly, you could do "cut and paste".

All things (and many others) you cannot do with the iPhone. I fail to see how the iPhone can be the new Newton.

Re:Would I? Well, it depends...

[garcia]

Then question is WHY would I buy it? Hell, I still have a mobile phone from 2002 and I won't change it. I don't have an ipod and don't want one. I don't even THINK about buying an iPhoney. I really don't need those things, so why would I need a newton? Because Apple has designed it?

Because I use a modern mobile device and do a lot of mo-photoblogging and enjoy having access to the web/AIM wherever I am. I don't care what YOU need, it's what I want.

I hope so, but...

[astrashe]

I just bought an iPod touch. And it's pretty much the greatest gadget I've ever owned. I love it.

I think a lot of what makes it great, though, is that the interface for Safari is heavily tweaked for web surfing. It's really easy to pan and scan around, and you can pinch and expand to zoom in and out. One of the most useful features is the ability to tap on a section of a web page and have it adjust the zoom intelligently to frame the text or photo you're dealing with. And then there's that turning the device on its side and having the screen roll with you thing.

The result of all of this is that you can surf really well on a very small device. I wouldn't have thought a full browser could be so usable on such a small device, but they did it, and it's great.

The other apps, though, aren't nearly as usable. The music player has cover flow, which is really quick and useful -- I didn't think it would be before I bought the touch, but it is. It's not that they're bad. It's just that all of that insanely great UI stuff is tweaked specifically for web browsing. The stuff that it does is aimed at that problem, and a lot of times the features aren't even implemented in other apps.

The point is that what they've done is different from making a new kind of widget set for portable devices. On a normal desktop system, and on a normal PDA, you have a widget set that lets apps run in GUIs and behave in standard ways. This has very specific gui tweaks for a key app, safari.

I think the philosophical change of the touch (and the iPhone, obviously) is that the designers seem to be working from the premise that usable UI on such a small device is challenging enough that you have to tweak things very specifically for the app of the moment, and not just use something more general like MFC.

So Safari is tweaked out brilliantly, and it's flat out amazing. The music player is ok, it's certainly functional, but it's not so amazing. It's not "I can't believe how cool this is" great.

I kind of wish I had my old iPod video interface back, honestly. Or I wish I could zoom in and out, to change the size of the type on my podcasts, because sometimes long titles are hard to read.

So the question is, how are you going to make a really great PDA? Do you have to have genius UI designers working on every app? I mean, how are you going to do IM on these things? How do you get around that "entering text sucks" barrier? And there's going to be some usability problem like that popping up over and over again in app after app.

(I think this is part of why they want to keep these things locked down -- I believe that Jobs really hates the idea of people running ugly unusable apps on his devices.)

I mean, they could make a PDA, and they could use the tech they already have, and it would probably be just another PDA with a standard general interface, and an insanely great web browser. And that would be cool. But I think they're more ambitious than that.

The iPhone has third party apps

[SuperKendall]

Not sure how you missed it, but the iPhone has a lat of third party apps - it's just that the loading mechanism is not officially supported. Putting your hands over your eyes going LA LA LA THERE ARE NO APPZ however does nothing expect make you appear extremely ill-informed.