My history with the Apple Newton goes back to the summer before my senior year in college. Apple’s PIE (Personal Interactive Electronics) group (before it got renamed as simply Newton) wanted to license my NotifyMail program and I negotiated a deal that I thought was excellent. I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the Newton Toolkit (developer tools) which was valued at over $1600 at the time in exchange for a site license. People at school poked fun at me, especially after the Simpson’s episode where one of the characters wrote “Beat up Martin” and it came out as “Eat Up Martha”. I played around writing some programs for it and when I joined Qualcomm full time the following year, I started work on Eudora for Newton (my boss lobbied to let us do it) and over the course of the next year, I got to work with some great people at Apple who were working on their TCP/IP stack. I got early access to Newton 2.0 and was amazed; when Apple killed the Newton, it was a small part of my life (a few years) sort of disappeared. The Newton had so many things that was ahead of its time; handwriting recognition (in the last OS, it was good), flexible data stores (it was easy to expand the address book), flexible applications (I could patch an application in no time flat), and a convenient form factor. I used to travel with the Newton and a keyboard instead of a laptop.
I haven’t thought much about the Newton until I was given an old eMate last year (which I haven’t turned on because I need to find a power supply). Today, a friend sent me a link to a comparison of the Newton (a ten year old product) and the latest UMPC (ultra mobile PC). Despite the age of the Newton, it did quite well which is kind of sad in that 10 years of computing, the handheld hasn’t really been improved. Comparing the Newton to the Palm is also interesting; the Newton OS had flash internal storage meaning that when the batteries died, your data wasn’t lost whereas the Palm OS didn’t get this (NVRAM) until the Tungsten T|X and Treo 650 which was not that long ago. This was one of the main reasons I didn’t think Qualcomm should go with the Palm OS for a smartphone…your battery dies (which most people seem to do with their cell phones) and you’d lose your data. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in pushing the Newton. (Prior to this, I was offered a job in the Newton group, but for better or worse, I turned it down and stayed at Qualcomm).
After reading that comparison, I started missing the Newton. If the Newton had developer tools that ran under OS X, USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, I think it would be a killer platform today. Yes, there are WiFi cards for it, so it isn’t a huge stretch. If anyone has a Newton MessagePad 2100 that he or she is willing to sell for a decent price, please let me know.