Slashdot Mirror
Apple Newton vs. Apple iPhone
An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK has written a head-to-head piece entitled Apple Newton vs Apple iPhone. Despite the Newton being released some 10 years ago, and despite the iPhone being a phone, not a tablet, the site's editors believe the Newton is the more innovative of the two Apple products. The two devices were tied over four rounds, but in the 'Special Powers' element, where the iPhone was praised for its iPod capability, the Newton countered with its ability to play MP3s, connect to iTunes and 'its ability to work as a phone' because 'Blam! Not even the iPhone can do that.'"
I have an iphone and love it. Amazing phone. But like just about everything else Apple has done, it's not really "innovative." They package well, but they never really come out with anything new. The closest thing they probably came to innovating on WAS the Newton.
I'd have to say that neither is truly "innovative" because that would imply something new was present in either of them, rather than a remix of existing technologies and/or incremental improvements on them (such as minaturization). The only really innovative thing I've seen out of Apple in awhile has been the touch wheel on the iPods; Which was quite a departure from existing human interface designs at the time. The word "innovative" has been quite overused in this field.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Shouldn't the iPhone get points in this comparison for not being the equivalent of carrying a Dell laptop's giant powerbrick around in your pocket?
I know this article was written all in fun, but - you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that'd want to carry a Newton around instead of an iPhone. Or a Newton instead of even a Windows Mobile device.
#DeleteChrome
You can rock some serious MP3 Action in all it's 128kbps 22Khz Mono glory! - http://40hz.org/Pages/MADNewton
The original Newton - the MessagePad - was released in 1993. Heck, The Steve *cancelled* Newton more than 10 years ago. Really.
It's been 21 minutes since this article was posted. Where's the next Apple Slashvertisement? I keep refreshing the front page but there are no new stories. /wrists
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
I had a Newton Message Pad 100 (the very first model) which I bought cheap in '94 on a whim. It was already totally outdated when I bought it. Still, in its lifetime, I printed from it, sent and received faxes from it, all kinds of stuff you'd normally need a computer for. Totally handy.
Come '96 and I'm in grad school and I take every note for the whole two years on that thing and it was GREAT. I mean really, had it been a pain would I have kept on the entire time? Having a pretty big screen meant you had plenty of room to scrawl out those notes on the screen, and as I had maybe not 'neat' handwriting, but at least consistent handwriting it worked great.
In 1996, being able to search your notes on the computer saved me so much time that I could have a band. So maybe having a Newton didn't get me chicks, but at least the band did!
Then, in 2000, I was still using it. But I accidentally left it on a conference room table after a meeting and it disappeared. It actually got STOLEN. In the 21st century.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
I really liked the part where the guy championing the Newton slapped KO'd his opponent with a link. She had previously written an article citing "The iPhone is the worst phone in the world".
I'm sure they had great make up sex later on.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Since the first Iphone as such has become known as the "2G" and the second as the "3G", I suggest thinking of the Newton as the Iphone 1G. (OK, so there were a few different versions of the Newton itself. But at this distance in time, I think we can ignore that.)
Peter
The original Newton - the MessagePad - was released in 1993. Heck, The Steve *cancelled* Newton more than 10 years ago. Really.
That's the submitter's error. Article says the Newton was 10 years old last time they did such a comparison, against an early windows mobile device.
Um what? If the iPhone was nothing new, when it was released and even now, you wouldn't have competitors scrambling to catch up. If there was no innovation, there wouldn't be anything to catch up to.
One thing they left out in the app comparison is that Newton users can add in any apps they wanted. They're not limited to the ones approved by Apple in the gated community known as the App Store.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Wow... just.... wow
That must be the worst written article I've read this month. Or possibly ever.
Hey, I know, let's next compare a raft made of barrels to the International Space Station and let's have the raft win because it has easier access and is cheaper to make and maintain.
Again. Just... wow
Hey, constant reinforcement is needed so that people know that the money spent and being spent on a phone and plan is justified. I like my phone too (It's an Android), but I don't need to be constantly told how smart or cool I am, based upon my purchase.. dumbasses and jerks can spend money on these things too.. and probably think it changes them somehow.. how sad.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
The funny thing is that I clearly remember reading an article from the early 1990s about Newton application developers complaining about having to write all their apps in Apple's scripting language with a limited API.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You insensitive clods!
Us fanboys need those articles. Otherwise we get shaky and irritable. And sad.
Right now is an especially bad time what with the holidays, the recession, the War in Afghanistan and the vague status of the iTablet (not necessarily in that order).
Have some mercy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't block this, but you can use Yahoo Pipes to setup a filter, it's nice. You just have to drag a "fetch" module and fill the source feed URL, then connect it to a "filter" modules and choose the keyword(s), and finally connect it to "Pipe Output" and save, afterwords it'll provide you an URL you can use on your reader. I use it for embedding cartoons in feeds which only provide a link to the cartoon, like Explosm.
I think Google as something similar, but I've never used it.
Dilbert RSS feed
You know, I've been seeing this exact same comment on a lot of tech sites lately. Heck, there's quite a few of them on this article alone. At first, I was like "Welcome to what it was like for us Apple guys 5-10 years ago", (not that I ever posted that, I just thought it). But the more I think about it, I think it just means that the iPhone, iPod, Apple, etc., is going more mainstream. I don't think its a purposeful marketing strategy on anyones part (maybe it is and I'm too blinded to see), but more or less just a natural affect of its growing user market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was something coming out of MS, Verizon, Dell, or the likes that was interesting, I'm sure we would be flooded with the same kind of daily stories about it. But that's just not happening. Is it because they are not producing anything that people feel compelled to write about or is it because they know that if they write something that has an "i" in the headline, then they will generate hits. Not sure, but it's kind of interesting either way.
And on a side note, your "viral" theory can be applied to your comment as well. How do I know that all the "I'm getting sick of all the Apple" comments aren't made by paid shills or some viral marketing company trying to make Apple look un-cool or whatever. Sure it's a conspiracy theory, but it's no less of one than yours.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
See, that's the thing that Apple does so well. They don't invent things. They make other inventions actually work.
Through exhaustive design iteration and engineering, they develop ideas that are "nice on paper but useless in practice" into things that actually deliver on the invention's promise. From desktop UNIX to high-capacity music players to the mobile web browser, Apple invented none of these, yet they all sucked until Apple treated each one not as a feature problem but as a design and usability problem.
That's not invention. But if it isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
The iphone, well, its a phone...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When was the last time you checked out the mobile market? Pretty much every phone has large screens, and slim cases, even the dirt cheap ones, without keyboards (and as someone who would prefer an actual keyboard, I find it annoying).
(And before anyone says it was the Iphone that caused this - screens have continually being getting larger since before the Iphone, and it was an obvious progression to what we have now; the Iphone wasn't first with touchscreen AFAIK; and slim cases were around before - e.g., Motorola's RAZR.)
The key to a beating the iPhone
Check out the market share - most companies, such as Nokia and Samsung, are already beating it. Of course I'll probably be modded down for saying so, because debates on Apple stories are won by whoever has mod points (which is never me, incidentally), and not who speaks the facts.
Hear hear. (And actually, I'm surprised that there's only one today, for once.)
It's particularly odd, given the small market share of the Iphone. If it was the Ipod, sure, I could understand - the largest in that market. Hell, even Macs have a larger market share, yet there are only occasional stories about them. But for the Iphone, there are quite literally daily stories - with virtually zero coverage of any of the other mobile phone companies (e.g., Nokia, who have about 40% of the market).
And the viral marketing works. I thought this was a place for people to be knowledgable about technology, but there are people who seriously believe that Apple sell more phones than anyone else (or even that they are in the majority - more than everyone else put together). They actually believe that the Iphone is the only phone, or the first phone, that can do things such as accessing the Internet. They still think that most phones in the market are still using WAP - something that was around 10 years ago.
Oh but occasionally we get stories about Blackberry and Android - also minor players - so I don't know what the logic is. Although coverage of Blackberry and Android seems mainly so they can be presented as token competition ("Look, the Iphone is better than them, or was before them", whilst pretending that that's all the market consists of.)
And sure enough, just after I post about how people here seem to have no idea of the phone market, one comes along:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was something coming out of MS, Verizon, Dell, or the likes that was interesting
Well, what about all of the interesting phones that are coming from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola etc? Virtually zero coverage, it's been that way for years - so yes, I'm correcting you that you are wrong :)
Unless for some reason, there's something special about MS, Verizon, Dell and Apple that they deserve coverage, but not the existing phone companies?
As for viral, I don't think he's suggesting that it's planted by Apple shills - personally I don't, but the point is that Apple are very good at getting other companies and individuals to give them free advertising and hype. No shills needed.
Pshh. You just need to be the right kind of fanboy.
With the first Pandoras likely getting shipped in early December, this is clearly going to be the best Christmas ever. I mean, screw recession, wars and the Apple rumor treadmill. Pandora fanboyism is like crack cocaine on more crack cocaine these days.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I am a big company with a monopolistic agenda and a marketing-driven corporate culture.
(Actually it's a trick question. You cannot possibly know if this is Microsoft or Apple, unless you know in which category you are playing: "Evil" or "Cool").
lucm, indeed.
Of course I'll probably be modded down for saying so, because debates on Apple stories are won by whoever has mod points (which is never me, incidentally), and not who speaks the facts.
Actually you'll probably be modded down for continually posting whiney little rants.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
I wonder if the daily Apple story isn't as much about the Haterz as about the fanbois? Slashdot posts an Apple story and the first thing that happens is that the Haters all pile into the thread and spew vitriol all over the place. Then the fanbois wade in and start bashing around with bats and mod points, and then before you know it: voila, 300 posts!
They don't post these stories just to soothe the fanbois, they post them because people, love it or hate it, are passionate about Apple. The haters need their Two Minute's Hate as much as the fanboys need their time of worship. As for myself, I'm getting pretty sick of it all. But hey, I guess I just can't help being drawn to the trainwreck.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Nice article that made me very curious about one thing: why did the Newton fail? It seems like an amazingly useful and cutting-edge device that should have been snatched up by everybody.
Maybe it was just a little bit TOO new, so didn't fit well enough into people's existing workflows?
Good band recognition and marketing qualify as technical innovation now?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
CNET has officially lost it!
Yes, obviously the computers, mp3 players and phones simply didn't work at all before Apple came along.
Respectfully (because maybe you weren't there to see it), desktop computing before the Woz really sucked.
Damn those pesky terrorists
1. Mention how you can access the Apple Store website On Your Iphone. That's a guaranteed way to get a story.
So where's the place on the Apple Store where you can buy your way out of a parking ticket?
According to Apple: "The Standard and Enterprise Programs allow you to share your application with up to 100 other iPhone or iPod touch users with Ad Hoc distribution. Share your application through email or by posting it to a web site or server."
So your app can only go to 100 people. If you attempt to use the program to sell or give away apps in an adhoc manner, Apple disables your developer key and then it can't install on more phones.
On Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, S60... basically every single mobile OS... you can develop and distribute applications as you see fit. With the iPhone, you're locked into only what Apple approves through the AppStore.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Palm had tens of thousands of apps available for it long before the iPhone was even designed. Many of those apps are still more powerful and useful than most iPhone apps because iPhone apps don't have access to the whole operating system and Apple won't let folks create apps that don't sit well with their business plan (which is why there's no real Google Voice on iPhone).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Or that's my $0.02
(Pardon the pun) you are right on the money! ;-)
seriously, people. lern 2 spele. its a 'poll' not a 'pole' - i guess this is what we get out of 'no child left behind' :(
It is cnet. They haven't been notable or interesting in 10 years either.
Most unices will allow you to allocate memory until you exhaust the virtual address space because they don't actually map the virtual address to a physical page until you try to access it. If every app all of the sudden tries to access all their memory, the system will run out and the oom killer will kill apps until there is enough memory.
You can turn on strict memory accounting in linux, but there are definite caveats...if you have an app using a bit over half the memory in the system, technically you can't fork() it because that would require more memory than is available--even if the child is going to simply call exec() right away.
What the heck do you need to multitask for on a phone anyway? Apps are supposed to save what they are doing and quit quickly and reload just as quickly (not that they always do.. the price of 3rd party apps.). If I were Apple I'd start rejecting apps that couldn't reload in 5 seconds. These apps annoy me anyway because they take forever just to load and most of them are from PC game companies that seemingly don't know the meaning of a mobile app. (Why the fsck does Scrabble take so long to load?)
There is usually no reason to have that app running when you aren't using it. The only real exceptions I can think of is live-event notifications for alarms, im, phone calls, etc which they've gotten closer to, network connections, and maybe background media playing which is built-in anyway.
I'd like to see them offer real multitasking but make it so users can disable apps from doing it if wanted because I don't want 10 badly written apps running in the background when they should just be able to reload quickly when I want them. The hard part is offering a good UI for open app management. Compare WinCE or Android to the iPhone for ease of use and they are lacking (more flexible means harder to use most of the time). I'd suggest making double-clicking the home button bring up an open apps manager along w/ the music controls - sweep left/right to find the desired app and click to resume.
It seems you're saying smart phones have to be difficult to use with poor battery-life. In that case you can keep it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
My fingers pine for the front panel of an IMSAI! I miss having to load a tape reader by hand.
Ooh! That's Aerosmith! Do I qualify - or did I flunk the marketing bit..?
whippersnapper! When I was a kid all our computing was done with yarrow sticks.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Well, ChatterEmail would be on that list. It's the only fully-featured mail client I've ever used on a phone. iPhone's mail client doesn't match it. Nor does Android's (even the K-9 Mail branch that I use). ChatterEmail had better IMAP and IMAP IDLE support *years* before anyone else.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
It actually has been (partially) ported. Unfortunately, because of how Apple locks down the OS, it can only work inside of the applications it comes bundled with.
http://www.phatware.com/index.php?q=product/details/writepad/writepad%22