I received my Newton MP2100 last week and it is everything that I had remembered (for the most part). The handwriting recognition works well and everything seems so elegant about this 10 year old technology. In fact, I’m writing this while sitting at the beach watching my wife surf (I’ll post it when I get home). People have developed WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for it (the Newton I purchased had both a WiFi and a Bluetooth card) and there are tons of programs for it. In addition, I know many in the old Newton developer community, so I have a wider access to free programs (free is always good). In addition, I loaded the HP IRDA printers drivers for it and was able to print from any application to my LaserJet 2100MP; a feat that still cannot be accomplished on Palm OS. I found a few email programs out there including MailV so that I can send my notes and such to myself via email. People are working on or have written apps to communicate with OS X. There are a few down sides to the Newton. It has always had a heap problem so you have to be careful with how many programs you install. I’m using NewtCase to “freeze” stuff I’m not using. The device doesn’t have USB so transferring stuff over the serial port (while doable) is slow. It doesn’t have color, but I’m not sure I mind that. I’m still wading through the hundreds of programs available to see what I want to install. SO far, I have a ToDo list program and I’m using Notes and Calls.
I don’t really remember how to program NewtonScript so it’s hard to hack away at programs (I want to bypass the registration code for the WiFi driver as the author is no longer accepting registrations for it and it delays for 10 seconds each time I insert the card). The Newton was so flexible in terms of modifying virtually any application (good from a hacker point of view, bad from the point of view of selling software) and it was very extensible. The soup method of storing information allowed other programs to add fields to say the Names application while still remaining compatible with the rest of the OS (everything is integrated so if you use the Calls application, you can look up a phone number). Palm OS isn’t this flexible and it hasn’t been until Palm, Inc. wrote their own Contacts application that the concept of extensible fields came to be; however the format is not compatible with older devices.
Did I mention flash memory? If the batteries die on this device, nothing is lost. Something that the Palm OS only got recently.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with my new acquisition. I still have more to remember and more to play with; this is the most excited I’ve been about technology in a long time.