Re: [NTLK] The day the Newton died it's final death...

The Newton still lives for one obvious reason - data input.

The iPhone obviously represents a great deal of labour and the
interface looks to be a very solid foundation for the control of a
mobile device. The genius of it is that it runs OS X, which means it
has long future and will be able to eventually run software of any
complexity and be able to connect to any kind of peripheral. This
must seriously challenge Linux and other mobile OSs for devices of
this kind. Unfortunately we have no real tech specs to get a handle
on the kind of capabilities it really has, so we'll have to wait for
June.

The version presented by Jobs is just the first iteration of what
could develop into a very versatile range of devices and I'm sure
that third parties will be all over it if Apple open it up properly.
The recently released Dashboard development environment might be a
great way to begin development for it. Hardware will evolve rapidly
with greater memory/performance/screens etc. They have paid a great
deal of attention to power management, which will feed back into the
mainstream OS on Macs.

However, until it can do HWR or at least support a Bluetooth
keyboard, demonstrate the accuracy to select and edit text easily and
the applications to handle it such as outlines, lists etc. so be a
proper data capture device - it's another 'smart dongle' almost
wholly dependent on its host computer or network.

This alone could make a good platform for reading if it supports PDF
and RTF. We know it does HTML and images. However this is only one
half of what should be a symmetrical relationship with data.

The scale on which the interface works is also (quite rightly for the
needs of this device) at a pretty high level of management and very
little in terms of detailed controls have been demonstrated, but
should be readily achievable.

What we have seen is the birth of a new platform and at some point in
the future it may well acquire the necessary features to make it into
a PDA but it's not there yet. I'm reasonably optimistic (2 year
contracts notwithstanding) and for now happy let it be what it is - a
superb fusion of entertainment, data access and communications.

Joel.

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