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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?
It better fix the Beat up Martin = eat up Martha handwriting recognition bug.
The Newton is already back, it's called the iPhone
#!/
1) It was released too early (needed another 3-4 months shaking out before hitting the shelves).
2) Synchronizing data was a painful process involving lots of cable manipulation, app-launching, etc. (the Palm had a dock: very easy)
3) Too expensive (by about $500)
4) Too large (Palm got it right)
5) NewtonScript was nice, but too weird. A C++ dev kit would have helped a lot (but was politically impractical in the Newton group)
6) Apple management wanted royalties on applications (which was just absolute bugf*ck insanity)
[Yeah, I worked on it.]
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
for the iPhone. Perhaps they're holding off for a iNewton? I'd friggin buy an OS X PDA in a second, just for safari, and the flexibility of a UNIX subsystem would just be extra goodies.
I have wondered for a long time if the Newton would resurface. I don't think it was a bad product idea, I just think it arrived before its time. Today it might succeed for 2 reasons:
1) Much greater technology penetration of main stream markets. (Not just for nerds anymore. Or perhaps "its hip to be square.")
2) CPU speeds are fast enough today to allow for a more advanced GUI in a portable device.
Think Deeply.
Best handwriting recognition of any device still, hands down. Though right now its more of a franken-newton, being cobbled together of as many new parts as possible. The only original part is now the motherboard, which is from a newton I salvaged in a yardsale a long time ago. And if I could clone it, I would in a heartbeat.
Though I am tempted on trying to compile the Einstein emulator on my iPhone, and using one of the two styluses designed for the iPhone that are being produced. But its not just the fantastic handwriting recognition that brings me back to it every year; its the large screen. The Newton was never meant to be a PDA, as it was made before that term was even cobbled together. It was originally developed to try and supplant the current buisness laptop. Longer battery life, more portable, and you can write, fax, etc with it. If you realize this, and that it was not a device built for comically big pockets, then it hit the mark perfectly.
How can you tell it hit the mark? Alright, users of Palm 3's, rase your hand. (*glances around*)
Psion 7 out there? (*glances around, sees a couple hiding in the closet*).
It hit the mark because we still talk about it. We still crave for it to come back. It might of even been around today if the spin-off company making them was not bought back by Apple shortly before Jobs got back, which he axed with childlike glee becuase it did not fit into his picture of a "user experience" device.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
No third-party installable apps, so no, it's not a Newton. However, it could be converted into a Newton with a slightly more ambitious operating system update.
The Lisa II.
If they took the technology in the iPhone and put it into a form factor that was more like a Day Planner than a Phone, then you would have a Truly Awesome companion device. Make it cover most of the functions of the iPhone, except for the phone part, and have it sync with the phone over Bluetooth. Give it WiFi and the ability to use a stylus -- but only in a pinch for lots of data entry or sketching. You'd want to build on the multi-touch goodness. Heck, with multi-touch my iPhone is already a better eBook for PDFs than my Sony Reader, and it's not even hacked! (I just put them on my personal website and view them in Safari. I put them in their own tab, and they stay there for a couple of hours without my having to download them again. Multi-touch rocks for reading stuff.)
There are situations where you wouldn't want your phone *and* a planner, but there are plenty of situations at work where you would find both very useful, but it would be cumbersome to drag a full-blown laptop along. In a larger form factor, the apps already on the iPhone would really rock. The iPhone would still be vital because of its form factor. You could still enter contact data and look at your agenda in a pinch. But for heavy-duty work, the additional screen real estate would be a big win.
I think this position misses the premise (which I happen not to believe).
The only reason the iPhone and iPod touch aren't the next generation Newton is that they aren't sold, supported, or configured as platforms for running third party software. If a "Next Generation Newton" was locked down, it wouldn't be a "Newton", it would be an iPod.
The whole thing boils down to money. Apple tried selling PDAs, and they didn't make a ton of money. By making the iPhone not a PDA, they not only get a nice chunk of rental revenue from AT&T, they avoid playing a game that they tried before and lost.
However, timing is important in business. Companies are getting out of the PDA business, which means it is time for a contrarian business to consider getting in. The big question with Apple is, what are they going to do to get people to buy more of their stuff? After a few more generations of iPhone and iPod, it's bound to become a harder sell. So a lateral move into a different product category is plausible, although it isn't inevitable they'll go back into the PDA business.
Maybe something that look a lot like the PDA business though. If I was smart enough to know what that might be, I'd be rich.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.