Cnet did an interesting comparison: Samsung’s recently released UMPC, vs. the… Apple Newton. “Fans will tell you that the Apple Newton was years ahead of its time. Ten years on we’re going to put that claim to the test. We’re pitting a vintage Apple Newton against the brand-new Samsung Q1 ultra-mobile PC in a head-to-head battle.” What’s more suprising is the winner, however.
The Newton design has many things going for it. The key insight is that it was designed from the ground-up to be used as a hand-held computer; its interface is optimized for use on the go and it’s fairly simple using it while standing up on a crowded train. All the common desktop interface metaphors were considered in that environment, and many were dumped as being inappropriate or unnecessary (people are often surprised at the rarity of the “Save” function in Newton software, for just one example).
At the same time it featured (for its time) an impressive processor that was optimized not for speed, but for maximum speed for minimum power consumption (something that’s starting to be looked at a bit more today). The result was incredibly long battery life.
I wrote a piece on various Newton features some time ago; it can be found at:
http://feneric.blogspot.com/2006/01/newton-technology-in-2006.html
Sure, the Newton is past its prime and there are many changes to the hardware that would make sense today. It could be made lighter, for one, and certainly things like wireless and Bluetooth ought to be built-in and not available only through cards. At the same time there’s a lot that can be learned from it; a simple evolutionary improvement to it would easily best most current PDAs and hand-held computers.
It’s also still fairly widely used, and its technology has spread around a bit. Portions of it have pretty obviously made their way into Mac OS X (Ink even responds to some old Newton Easter Eggs, and some of OS X’s animations are mighty familiar to Newton users) while other chunks are available here and there. Paul Guyot’s Einstein project makes it possible to run Newton software on Linux or Mac OS X, and my own little Newton Book Reader Extension for Firefox makes it possible to read Newton books anywhere that Firefox (or Flock or Seamonkey) can run.
See also:
http://www.kallisys.com/newton/einstein/en
http://www.newtonslibrary.org/nbrdr/
These Newtons are pretty cool for a 10 year old machine. I had no idea. Makes one wonder why they didn’t become a huge success. The Samsung is pretty cool too, except for the anemic battery life. And it’s quite expensive too. Upside is that it isn’t stylus-only, which I think is a smart decision.
Btw, what’s with this ‘but the Newton has a 100dpi screen’ talk? I didn’t do the math but I’m sure that the Samsung comes out a lot higher with its slightly larger screen but much higher pixel count. Unless I’m missing something. How’s dpi relevant anyway? IMO the amount of pixels is the only thing that counts when dealing with screens.
DPI is relevant because it’s a decent representation of the amount of information you can pack in a small space.
The fact that the newton won probably has to do with it being B/W. With color you have to have 3, uh, spots, for one pixel, whereas B/W only needs one.
Back to the actual machines – the newton looks perfect for my purposes – simply editing text. I need something like a laptop, but cheap, and with a long battery life.
I wonder how well it handles programming symbols such as {} [] <> ;. I definitely need those.
I don’t really need asomething to compile my programs – it’d just be nice to be able to have something to write scraps on while I’m away from the computer.
DPI is relevant because it’s a decent representation of the amount of information you can pack in a small space.
The fact that the newton won probably has to do with it being B/W. With color you have to have 3, uh, spots, for one pixel, whereas B/W only needs one.
It’s a decent representation of how much information can be packed in an inch – I can agree with that. What I did’t get is why they say, “The Newton’s display resolution is 480×320, a step down from the Q1’s 800×480 pixels. But the Newton uses a 100dpi display“, while the Q1 has much higher horizontal dpi and vertically it’ll most likely be above 100 as well (but I can’t find dimensions on that screen except that it is 7″ diagonally, vs 6” 3.3×4.9 for the Newton). Whether pixels are 24bit RGB or 8bit monochrome has nothing to do with it.
Think of resolution as quantity and dpi as quality. You can have a screen high a high resolution with low dpi. The individual pixels will look pretty bad.
The newton was a Solution looking for a problem. Portable computing, as a consumer item, had not evolved in the public sphere yet (in terms of mindshare). Cupple that with the netwon’s very expensive cost, and the fact that support was cut by Apple’s New CEO at the time.
I am actually shocked that Jobbs has not revived it. They own all of the rights, they have the technology. There were rumors for a time (when OS X appeared) because many Newton apps were showing up in Apple’s other products such as OS X (Ink, etc).
I am actually shocked that Jobbs has not revived it.
If I’m not misinformed, isn’t the handheld market declining? Perhaps Apple doesn’t want to get burned a second time.
depend on what you define by handheld.
a old style pda, then yes. but if its a modern “webpad” then no.
by webpad im think devices like nokia 770 that can display your avarage webpage without having to reformat it into a very long column…
then there is the pdaphone or smartphone.
the comparison between a “origami” and the newton is fair in that they seems to have about the same size and form factor (when you tilt the newton over that is).
i wonder what the batterylife of a newton would be if they replaced the screen with a e-ink based one.
still, why should apple revive it? to me it seems that they allready have the overgrown pda market coverd by their laptops
Support for the Newton was indeed cut by Apple’s new CEO, or rather iCEO as he was then, Steve Jobs. That is why Steve Jobs has not revived the Newton – he’s the guy who killed it.
The only surviving part of Newton right now inside Apple is the handwriting recogniser, which lives on as Inkwell in Mac OS X. As a Mac OS X feature it has a few minor improvements, but also lacks some capabilities of the Newton version, such as InkText, shape recognition, and a few gestures, since Mac OS X wasn’t designed for pen-based usage.
Oh, Thanks. I wasnt sure if it was Steve Jobs (I do remember that now), If i remember correctly apple was bleeding money on so many different projects/prodcuts and Jobs had to make the call on what to keep and what to let loose.
I really believe that jobs should revive it. WebPads are getting big. I have my Nokia 770, and it is awesome (but not without flaws). This would be a great time to release a user friendly, fast, easy to use, webpad (with eReader DRM tech as well).
I agree about the Nokia 770. I’ve been really happy with mine. And battery life is surpisingly long. It lasted an 8 hour flight playing ripped DVDs. Active use of WiFi lowers it down to the rated 3.5 hours, though.
I’m still a big fan of the Psion 5 palmtop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_5
Personally I’d much rather have a keyboard than handwriting input. One of the main reasons why I use a portable computer is so that I don’t have to hand write things. Somehow Psion managed to fit a highly usable keyboard onto a device that fits easily into a jacket pocket. I very much doubt that even the fastest scribbler and the best handwriting recognition could match the typing speed and accuracy attainable with the Psion’s great little keyboard.
Without the overhead of handwriting recognition an 18Mhz CPU was perfectly fine and its EPOC (now Symbian) OS was lightning fast, multitasked well, and was very stable. It had an even more impressive battery life than the Newton, providing 40 hours with only 2 AA batteries.
The bundled software was brilliant, on a par with a lot of “Works” packages for desktop computers. For example you could embed objects, such as a section of spreadsheet or a diagram from a vector drawing app, into other documents. Just tap the embedded object with the stylus to open it in the original application for editing. You could create complex professional documents on a computer that fit in your pocket, and with the quality keyboard typing long essays and taking notes in a lecture was perfectly practical.
Compared with that the Windows CE hardware and software around at the time was a pathetic joke. The Psion was a very impressive little computer in 1997 and it was certainly much more than a glorified electronic diary like most PDAs.
Like the Newton it was a much more practical portable computer than a lot of the portable PCs around today. Like the Newton it should have been much more of a success than it was. Why do so many people ignore great products like these?
amen! I LOVE my psion hardware. Recently sold a netbook 64mb model. Sorely miss it, but it had to go for a few reasons
I still have a psion 5mx. I’d use it daily if the backlight hadn’t died.
p.s.
oh, and CE is still a joke
Edited 2006-07-29 02:22
Quote: oh, and CE is still a joke
Amen to that! As are the newer Mobile versions….
Wohoo! What you said!
I’ve just picked up an nearly unused Series 5 for next to nothing to replace my falling apart one.
“One of the main reasons why I use a portable computer is so that I don’t have to hand write things.”
Same here, I *hate* having to write things by hand.
In all fairness, I’ve started to see the apeal of a small ‘Palm’ form factor device in certain situations. However, you just can’t beat the keyboard, stability, versitility and battery life combination of a psion.
Psion was terribly advanced, and an awsome machine.
Newton handwriting, however, also included a simpler, faster “scribble” option: instead of recognizing your input, it just let you write and copied it as a picture. THAT is fast, and no distractions from inaccurate “translations”…. You can “convert” it to type later by highlighting and double-tapping. For me, that is even better than typing, as I can read my own scribbles much better than can software, and I can scribble bettere than I can type, and one can even use Gregg or a personal version of shorthand to skip the recognition. It’s still better than paper, because of all the other features/functionds, and because you can translate from shorthand to regular writing or type on the same screen, and export it to a computer later…
Actually, I’m the sort of person who finds typing faster and more convinient that writing with pen. I may be in the minority though?
What I find interesting is how beefy the newton hardware really was. I’ve been following DS Linux for some time and they are trying to cram linux onto a 66 Mhz + 33 Mhz ARM machine, with 4 MB of Ram. The newton seems to be between this and a modern day low end PDA. While the Newton might not be beefy enough to cram a full OpenEmbedded distro on to it (http://www.openembedded.org/) If you used DS Linux as a base you probably be able to get a pared back Opie to run on it (http://opie.handhelds.org/). (The only reason why I don’t say GPE is because you’d need to get an xServer (like kDrive) running.) Hmm, I think a DS Linux base + Opie on a Newton would be a fun project…
The real question would be why you would want to replace a well-integrated OS that does handwriting recognition well, by one that’s not well-integrated, not fit for the purpose, and doesn’t have the great handwriting recognition..
I’m all for cooky projects, but this seems a bit..backward, for lack of a better term.
exactly
Who knew the Newton had an HVGA screen?
Anyway, it would be interesting to see a comparison between the Q1 and the LifeDrive.
“I’m all for cooky projects, but this seems a bit..backward, for lack of a better term.”
Why try to get Linux + Opie on a Newton? Just because you can. For fun. There doesn’t really need to be any more of a reason than that. It’s a decade old dead hardware platform– if you can’t do cooky things and smile about it on that, why do cooky things at all?
I had no idea the Newton was so advanced for its time. Just imagine what it could be like today if Apple put out an updated version. Wow.
i fear that it would be more like the ipod. special battery that can only be swaped by using special tools and so on…
it’s nice in theory, but in practice the newton is useless, it’s funtionality is inferior to a windows mobile smartphone, and the 30hour battery life… it isn’t even worth commenting, it isn’t capable of vieweing images, video, real life documents(word,excel,ppt), web browsing is impossible due to lack of a capable browser, two pcmcia slots are nice, but what about the impact on battery life, lack of drivers, lack of authentication support, lol.
“windows has viruses, keyloggers, etc, etc, etc”
lol, yet, the simple installation of free anti virus software keeps you safe, and I for example never have been infected by any of the 10.000.000.000.000 of “bad software”, even without anti virus software you can stay safe, i’m using my tablet without any extra protection for about a month without issues, websites like osnews don’t have trojans have they? all my mail is scanned automatically, mail.live.com and gmail.com lol, it’s just stupid to make the virus issue a big one, but who cares, let them think of it as one.
oh and, those 2.5h of battery life really sucks, an acer c300 has 6h with a centrino 1.6, they should have increase the price to include a better battery.
Perhapse if you would have read the article and its comments in full you’d know that the necessary software for browsing, viewing images/documents, … exists.. not to mention additional support for bluetooth and Wifi.
I never used AV softw on my ex-Win boxes (all linux now), if you pay very close attention in your surfing habbits and such you can easilly avoid infection with virusses (this cannot be said about spyware… spyware is such a pain in the ass it’s unavoidable on a windows machine). But for the average user malicious software is an issue and an AV is the minimum you can do.
Another thing:
One does not simply look at the features of a product but most importantly at its usability. That is a serious misunderstanding amongst IT engineers and so far Apple is one of the few companies that design their products for usability. Hence the succes of iPod… I did not get a manual with it, simply because it isn’t needed, it is idiot-proof. Almost all other mp3-players I’ve ever seen came with a manual. As for me, I’ve worked with a newton several times and it was a hell of alot more usable and smarter than that **** PocketPC pda for my gps.