Speeds and Feeds

I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most Internet applications (Web browsing, e-mail, chat, etc.). And as I described yesterday, small notebooks are quickly lifting themselves out of the "Netbook" ghetto, gaining performance and cutting power consumption to become reasonable alternatives for those times when a smartphone just isn't enough.

The tokidoki edition Fujitsu LifeBook U820 mini notebook.

(Credit: Fujitsu Computer Systems)

But I think there's still a legitimate niche for MIDs and other miniature mobile PCs. As I've mentioned here before, I used to carry around a 1.5-pound computing gizmo along with a conventional laptop. It was an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100--officially a PDA, not a MID--but it was as close to a MID as the technology of the time allowed. It came with a Web browser, and for a while I had mine equipped with a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, so I could access the Web and e-mail on the go.

It often seems to me that I would like to go back to that kind of device, rather than trying to make my iPhone and my laptop do the same jobs. In fact, I think my note-taking capability has actually declined with each new handheld platform I've adopted--the Newton was better than the Palm Treo, and the Treo was better than the iPhone. Today, when I attend conferences or want to scribble down some idea that can't be represented in a paragraph or two, I grab a Moleskine notebook (the pocket Sketchbook version).

My own experience is merely anecdotal evidence, however, and I know better than to rely on that. So what are the real markets for the MID?

Coincidentally, I think it works out to three E's: education, entertainment, and executive applications. All three areas lead to situations where a person might want access to more computing and communications resources than a smartphone can provide but won't necessarily want to carry around a notebook--or try to use one while standing--to get that.

The educational market for these small machines has yet to develop because current MIDs don't yet offer the right combination of small size, all-day battery life, and low price, but I believe they'll get there within the next year or so. People often talk about e-book readers as being the right answer for educational computing, but e-books are more about static content, and education is ideally an interactive process.

The entertainment focus was clearest with UMPCs (another dead category, though I'm hardly the first to point that out). UMPCs were marketed as "lifestyle" gizmos, as if many people were ever going to make a relatively bulky 7-inch display tablet PC with two-hour battery life part of their lifestyle. But in a smaller form factor--say a 5-inch display, a total weight under a pound, and battery life of at least five or six hours--a MID can fit this bill. As long as it's small enough (and rugged enough) to carry around in a purse or jacket pocket, and cheap enough to be written off to the entertainment budget like a Netflix subscription or a new TV, a MID could indeed become a lifestyle product.

The Viliv S5 Entertainment MID provides full PC compatibility in a PDA-size package.

(Credit: Yukyung Technologies)

I saw a gizmo at CES that fit this definition pretty well, the Viliv S5 from Korean consumer-electronics maker Yukyung Technologies. Yukyung is one of many companies making portable video players, but its new offerings are quite distinctive.

The S5 is like a right-sized UMPC, with a 4.8-inch touch-screen display (800x480 or 1024x600 pixels, depending on model). It can play HD video, and it comes with Windows XP on a real hard disk, so there's no problem installing other software.

The S5's Intel Atom processor provides very good battery life: the company specifies six hours of movie playback. The device is about 6 x 3.3 x 1 inches in size--a lot smaller than my old Newton--and weighs less than 14 ounces.

There are also two 7-inch screen Viliv machines, the X70 slate-style tablet and the S7 convertible tablet. Both, amazingly, are still smaller than my old Newton.

Executives have always been the focus of some high-end handheld PC developers such as OQO, Sony, and Fujitsu.

Fujitsu didn't have any major updates to announce at CES for its LifeBook U820 series, though it was showing a model with case art from tokidoki, an Italian (but Japanese-inspired) lifestyle brand, and I got a chance to talk with a couple of PR people from Fujitsu about the U820 and other Fujitsu products.

The U820 is basically a complete convertible tablet PC squeezed into a 1.3-pound package: a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD with 1,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB or 120GB hard disk, Windows Vista Home Premium, and so on. It offers pretty much every kind of communication technology a person could ask for: Bluetooth, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional AT&T wireless broadband, and even a GPS receiver.

From my perspective, the U820 is actually smaller than it needs to be, which is most apparent in the micro-sized keyboard, but it's an impressive technical accomplishment nonetheless.

For many people, the new Sony Vaio P-series (a CNET Best of CES award winner this year) may prove to be more practical, with its 87 percent-pitch keyboard and 8-inch widescreen LCD. But the Sony is beyond all but the largest pockets. Sony has made smaller machines in the past, such as the Vaio UX series, but these have been discontinued.

The OQO model 2+ brings better performance at a lower price than earlier OQO models.

(Credit: OQO, Inc.)

OQO also made a big splash at the show with its new model 2+, an unprepossessing name for a product even more technically impressive than Fujitsu's. The new OQO machine has almost all the features of the U820, but in a considerably smaller, lighter package. There are some differences; the model 2+ has a lower screen resolution (800x480) but is available with a faster CPU and more RAM. Also, the OQO is available with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that really looks fantastic, with high contrast and deep saturated colors.

The model 2+ is in the same enclosure as the older OQO model 2, hence the trivial name tweak, but there's another big difference from that older product: the 2+ has a starting price of just $999, $500 less than the starting price of the 2. And the base model of the 2+ is a much better system than the high-end model 2 configuration was.

Just as there were some ARM-based Netbooks at CES, there were also some ARM-based MIDs on display. With no clear advantages over smartphones except for display size, I don't think these products will attract customers. But that problem is CPU-specific; it doesn't apply to the more powerful x86-based products.

So okay, there's some good MID hardware out there. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. What MIDs need are lower prices, more rugged designs, and some MID-optimized software. The fact that Windows runs on these small displays doesn't mean that style of user interface is right for them. I know people at Microsoft who are working on this aspect of the problem; I hope they get the chance to bring their solutions to market, ideally in the Windows 7 time frame.

All in all, there's a lot of interesting activity in these smaller form factors. I think these tiny machines face a long uphill struggle to gain market share, but at least they have a unique and clearly defined product concept: a PC in a pocket.

(Sheesh, I've been busy lately. I had more spare time when I was employed!)

Ever since I got my iPhone 3G in late July, I've been keeping track of the things I like--and don't like--about it.

Since Apple is rumored to be releasing the next major iPhone firmware update today, I thought I'd run through the list now, and then see how the new firmware changes things. Many of these comments apply to the iPod touch as well.

The things I like are, generally, the same things everyone likes. The iPhone is feature-rich, well integrated, well supported by independent software developers, and fun to use.

The things I don't like are, generally, software features that ought to be present but just aren't.

Each time I discover another one of these missing features, I jot it down in my iPhone WTF list. WTF, of course, stands for "Where's the feature?"

Muting and sounds
For example: Where's the feature to mute the phone? You may point to the little toggle switch on the left side, but no, that just mutes the ringer and certain audio alerts, not the whole phone. On my old Palm Treo, the mute switch darn well muted everything, as if the switch disconnected the speaker wires themselves.

On the iPhone, there's no way to predict which sound sources will respect the mute switch. Calendar alerts do; alarms don't. These are good choices--I like knowing that the alarm function will still wake me up even if I mute the phone before going to sleep--but hardly intuitive.

Alarm volume is controlled by the ringer volume, but even the minimum ringer volume is still audible.

Application-generated sounds have a separate volume control. If you're not in the iPod application, which has a volume slider, I think the only way to adjust this control is to use the volume rocker switch while an application is making sounds. Sometimes, that's after the phone has already started to annoy the people around you.

Bottom line: I can't find a way to make the unit completely silent without going into multiple Settings panels and applications, and even that isn't completely effective because some applications (as exemplified by the otherwise valuable Phone Aid) will turn the volume back up when they run.

Alerts and Calendar app
While I'm on the subject of alerts: in the Calendar application, where's the function to set an alert for the exact time of an event? Sometimes I just want to beep myself at 10 a.m. to make a phone call, for example. I don't want to have to set the time for 10:05 a.m. and the alert for "5 minutes before." I love the fact that Calendar supports up to two alerts for the same event, but I wish I could set them to, say, 15 minutes and 0 minutes respectively. This problem could be solved by providing a "Custom" time choice for both of the alerts.

Apple's iPhone 3G

(Credit: Apple)

The Calendar app also has the worst user-interface design in the whole iPhone, I think. To select the date and time for an alarm, you spin three wheels apparently stolen from the game show The Price Is Right. The minutes wheel is so easy to spin that in going from :00 to :30, I commonly spin right past :30 and back to :00. Apple has developed many ways to select dates and times for other systems and applications; this is by far the worst.

The Calendar app does something else that's kind of silly. In the daily view, most events get two lines of text: the title and location. Displaying these two lines takes up about one hour of the day. For a shorter event--one scheduled for 30 minutes, say--the two lines get squeezed into one line in an attempt to maintain the orderly appearance of the schedule.

But come on, Apple! The lines on a sheet of paper are fixed. The lines on a computer display aren't. Stretch the lines apart so that every event gets the space it needs! Jeez, this isn't rocket science.

Similarly, a long event has plenty of room to display additional information, such as the notes associated with the event--but instead, the event ends up with two lines of text and a bunch of wasted blank space. Display the notes, and shrink the event if that helps to keep the whole day on the screen. I hate having to scroll the Day display just to show two events.

The Calendar app doesn't handle multiple-user event scheduling very well. Invitations received by the iPhone's Mail app aren't understood by the phone. I can go look at the message on my Mac and add the event to my calendar there, and eventually the event shows up on my iPhone, but that's not so good when I'm traveling. And even then, the event can't be edited on the iPhone--not at all, not even to change the times.

The Calendar app does something very nice: the icon on the iPhone's home screen shows the current day and date. So, where's the feature? Why don't all of Apple's apps do this sort of thing where appropriate? The Clock app icon always shows 10:15. The Weather app always shows sunny and 73 degrees. The Stocks app shows a random squiggle. Sure, updating all these icons would give the iPhone some extra work to do--so Apple should provide a "Live icon updates?" setting and have some rules about how often the updates should happen. I think the slight increase in overhead would usually be worth it.

... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

It's been 19 days since I tried and failed to get a new iPhone 3G, but today I became eligible for the discounted price, and at 7:50am I was in line at the Apple Store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in San Jose.

As you can read in my previous post, I couldn't get the usual low price for my new iPhone because I had 19 days left on my current 2-year AT&T service contract. Apple was willing to sell me the phone for an extra $200, but I decided I'd rather wait until today.

I was the sixth person in line, and by 8:00am when the store opened, there were five more iPhone buyers in line behind me.

As we lined up, we received cards from an Apple employee reserving the particular model we wanted. I'd estimate the fellow had about 40 cards. I asked if the number of cards corresponded with the number of iPhones in stock, but he wouldn't say. Another Apple guy followed behind, checking our AT&T upgrade eligibility. I did this myself last night, so I was sure it would be okay this time, and indeed it was.

The doors opened right at 8:00am and ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

With Intel's focus on the new Atom-brand processors being described at the Intel Developer Forum this week, "Atom-powered" is the obvious description of the mobile Internet devices (MIDs) these chips will go into... and it seems like half the IDF stories on the Internet this week are using that phrase.

Intel's Atom processor (on the right) and its companion System Controller Hub code-named Poulsbo.

(Credit: Intel Corp.)

Intel, however, seems to want even more hyperbole-- it expects people to believe that Atom will recharge the whole company. CEO Paul Otellini reportedly said "This is as important to Intel as the launch of the Pentium in the mid-1990s"-- but that's ridiculous.

The original Pentium processor and its descendants were responsible for nearly all of Intel's revenue. Atom will be merely a blip on Intel's financial reports.

The problem with Atom, especially these early models, is that the niche they occupy is a no-man's land between truly mobile devices like cellphones and MP3 players, and truly powerful devices such as laptop computers.

Atom consumes ten times as much power as cellphone processors and one-tenth the power of laptop processors. This power consumption makes for a device that has to be larger than a cellphone, and has to be smaller than a laptop because it can't provide comparable functionality. And there simply aren't enough applications that fit naturally into devices in that size range.

Look, I have as much experience with MIDs as anyone. I used an Apple Newton for seven years (as I've written about here several times). The Newton had roughly the same form factor and somewhat lower power consumption than today's MIDs. For a while I had a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem that gave me wireless Internet access.

But the simple fact is that the Newton wasn't useful enough to make me carry it around all the time. I loved mine because I had one critical application for which it was perfect. It was my electronic reporter's notebook, and no small-screen device could ever substitute for it. But most people don't need one of those.

And most people don't need a 5" to 7" display for basic Web browsing... at least, not enough to actually carry one around. And if you can carry something too large for a pocket, you can carry a small notebook PC that can handle a traditional notebook CPU.

Even after the Atom family evolves to the point that it can fit into cellphones-- which is the only way it's going to achieve significant sales volumes-- profits from these chips will never be very high. Intel's never going to achieve a monopoly in cellphone processors, and the competition from ARM-based cellphone chips will keep the value of a CPU core under a few bucks.

What Intel doesn't want people to think about very much right now is that in a cellphone, the CPU core is about the least-valuable part of the system. Even in a MID with an Atom processor, the CPU is just a tiny part of the whole package. Look at that picture up there-- the Atom processor is small compared with its companion system controller. In a cellphone, there's even more circuitry required for the radios.

And that's why Intel's never going to be an Atom-powered company, and I'm sure Otellini knows that in spite of everything he's been saying. But when your stock price has been trending downward for seven years in spite of the fact that you're running the world's largest semiconductor company with a stranglehold on the world's largest semiconductor market, I suppose you have to try to drum up as much excitement as possible for every new product that comes along.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the official death of Apple's Newton, the world's first PDA (personal digital assistant). There were pocket computers before the Newton, but the Newton was the first device to target PDA functionality so specifically.

Peter's MessagePad 2100

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

The original Newton MessagePad was not a very practical product. Its handwriting recognition was inadequate, its processor was too slow, its local storage was too small. But the ultimate Newton, the MessagePad 2100, was glorious. It was powerful, reliable, easy to use, and surprisingly expandable with third-party hardware and software.

I used a MessagePad 2100 from 1997 to 2004, and I've written about the Newton several times here because I believe there are still many important lessons that the computer industry can learn from the Newton. Previous blog posts include an overview of my Newton experiences, a detailed summary of the Newton's strong points, and an even longer list of problems that remained in the Newton until its final days.

Of course, the Newton isn't really dead. There's still an active community of Newton developers-- not as many as there once were, but there's still respectable progress being made. The NewtonTalk mailing list attracted 586 messages in January, and there are many other Newton websites including a great archive of Newton software.

Today, we're still waiting for Apple to release the promised iPhone developer kit for native applications (although Web-based development is already well supported). Third-party software can't turn the iPhone into a Newton replacement; for one thing, the iPhone can't be used with a stylus, so handwriting recognition is impossible. But if Apple wanted to, it could rearrange the components it uses in the iPhone and other products to create something worthy of being called Newton 2.0; I wrote about this topic here, too.

Will it ever happen? I don't know. Maybe Steve Jobs still resents John Sculley's role in promoting the Newton platform at a time when Apple should have been paying more attention to the Mac. But the fact remains that the Newton was uniquely valuable when it was on the market, and in the ten years since then, no other product has even come close to replacing it. That adds up to a market opportunity, one that Apple is still in the best position to profit from. I hope they give it a try.

My thanks to Morgan Aldridge at the Small Dog Apple Blog for marking the date and to EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert for bringing Aldridge's post to my attention.

Before I move on to other topics for a while (next week is Siggraph, the coolest trade show of the year as far as I'm concerned), I want to describe some of the ways in which the Apple Newton fell short. I'll also explain how these deficiencies relate to today's similar devices-- PDAs, smartphones, and tablets.

As with my post yesterday, these comments are drawn from notes I made during the seven years I used a Newton MessagePad 2100.

Peter's MessagePad 2100

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

• Very early on in my Newton experience, I made a simple comment: "Yes, it's too large." The MP2100 was huge, nearly the size of ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog

I used an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 pretty much every day for about seven years (see my previous blog entry about my Newton experiences).

What was so great about it? What kept me using it?

Peter's MessagePad 2100

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Well, I used the Newton to keep track of the good things about the Newton--and the bad things too. So to write this article, I just powered up the unit (which still works fine, along with a Farallon Ethernet PC Card, a 24MB linear flash card, and two of the three nickel metal hydride battery packs, plus another pack for AA alkaline batteries) and reviewed the "Newton Notes" entry.

Updated 2007-08-02, 1500 PDT-- That's it in the photo. It isn't as pretty as an official Apple product shot, but that's how it looks today. If you click here, you can see a higher-resolution version of the photo. The stylus in the picture is a custom model I turned from a solid bar of titanium. It sits nicely in the stylus rest (shown extended) and locks properly into the internal storage slot.

The note shown is the last one I entered, when I took the machine to the Worldwide Newton Conference on January 14, 2006. Note that there are 2,777 notes in the Newton. There are a few hundred more that were created in the months before the Ricochet wireless modem problem I described in that earlier blog entry, and these were recovered from the device's memory to a disk file. So all told, I averaged well over one note per day for about seven years.

Here are some of the high points from my Newton experience:

• Never having to save files. Files are always saved. In fact, there were a few times over the years when the Newton rebooted or the battery died while I was in the middle of writing a note. After restarting, the note was usually only a word or two behind what I'd been writing.

• Ultrahigh reliability. Other than the Ricochet problem, the Newton rarely crashed (just a few times per year, not counting those caused by software testing, which I did a lot of), and almost never lost data. In fact, it was so reliable that I became quite blase about backups, and I never really worried about installing third-party software.

• Extraordinary battery life. My Newton would run for upward of 20 hours with the backlight off, even with the Ethernet and flash PC cards installed. I think the Newton was designed to keep the Ethernet card pretty much entirely turned off when it wasn't in use; I couldn't see a difference in battery life with it in or out. The flash card was used constantly, since it held a lot of software and data. With the backlight on, battery life was still in excess of eight hours.

This kind of battery life makes a huge difference in usability. I could sit in conferences and leave the Newton on for hours, continuously ready to take more notes. Even though the Newton turns on and off in about a second, I could set the idle timer to wait half an hour before turning the unit off automatically; battery life was just no big deal. I could also take weekend trips without taking along a power adapter. For trips up to about a week long, I'd bring along a spare battery pack and still not bother with the power adapter.

I notice that the electroluminescent backlight on my Newton is really dim now. It probably hasn't gotten any worse since 2004, but I probably just got used to it as it dimmed over time.

• The case had a nice high-friction coating. The slightly rubbery surface made it really easy to hang onto the Newton. Some people had a lot of trouble with this coating rubbing off, but it held up fine on mine. I'm sure that it helped a lot that I kept the Newton in a zippered slipcase made from a large travel wallet.

• The user interface for the notes application was basically like a continuous scroll of paper. This seemed a lot more convenient than treating each note like a separate document. On the other hand, it put a lot of pressure on the scrolling controls. By the time I had hundreds of notes in the machine, I needed something more than the standard scroll arrows. Fortunately, Newton developers noticed this need, and there were good software solutions available.

• The recognizer was an excellent match for my fairly neat printing. When I (or the recognizer) made mistakes, they were usually easy to correct by double-tapping the word to get a list of likely substitutes. I did notice that the list of suggested fixes seemed to be based exclusively on likely recognition errors; it would have been useful to get spelling corrections too.

• Direct overwrite also worked well. If I could see a single letter that was misrecognized, it was usually faster to just write the correct letter over it. Today's Tablet PCs don't respond well to this approach, and I think that's a major omission.

The default mode of operation was that text was always recognized and converted to a font-based display, as opposed to the default in Tablet PC today, which is to recognize the text but leave the ink on the display. This creates the potential for the user to be distracted by the recognition process (and errors) but leads to higher-quality recognized text. This trade-off favors experienced users at the expense of initial impressions, but I think that's the right trade-off to make.

And there's a subtle point here: the default Newton font looks like very neat handwriting--a lot like the lettering in comic books. This means that characters with similar handwritten shapes have similar font shapes too. So if the Newton misrecognized a letter here or there, the resulting word was easier to read correctly by virtue of the same skill that helps people read bad handwriting.

In reviewing this "Newton Notes" list, I realize that there were a lot of things that bothered me at one time or another about how the Newton worked, and I spent a lot of time thinking up ways to improve the software and hardware. I'll blog about these notes later.

[Click here to read part 2 of this piece, "What wasn't so great about the Newton?"]

Since the iPhone's June 29 launch, we've seen several teardown reports--some from professionals, some demonstrating more enthusiasm than skill, and some that are just awful (but funny).

What's inside? Well, you can read the details in reports from various analyst firms, but it breaks down like this:

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

• A microprocessor
• A 3D graphics controller
• DRAM
• Flash memory
• An LCD
• A touch sensor
• A cell phone module
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controllers
• An audio chip
• A microphone and a speaker
• An accelerometer
• A camera module
• A SIM card
• Assorted other interfaces, connectors and buttons
• A lithium-ion battery
• Power-supply circuitry

All these components weigh less than 5 ounces and fit into a space less than 5 cubic inches. That's just amazing to me.

What could we make by adding, removing, or changing components?

• A mini Newton: drop the cell phone module, add stylus support
• iGame: Drop the cell phone module, add a joystick and more buttons
• A wide-screen iPod: swap out the cell phone module for a 1.8-inch hard disk
• A smaller cell phone: substitute a smaller LCD, simpler software, no Wi-Fi
• A smaller iPod: the smaller cell phone without the cell phone module
• An Internet tablet à la the Nokia N800: use a 5-inch LCD, drop the cell phone
• A Newton: use that 5-inch LCD, add stylus support and Apple's Inkwell software
• An auto navigation system: use the 5-inch LCD, drop the cell phone, add a GPS receiver
• A UMPC: use a 7-inch LCD, add iLife, and iWork
• An education laptop: use a 12-inch LCD, add a keyboard and educational software
• A mobile companion à la the Palm Foleo: the same, but with business software
• A tablet Mac: use that 12-inch LCD, a faster x86 processor and the full Mac OS X

Now that Apple has developed this platform, with a custom version of Mac OS X that runs on an ARM processor, it would be silly for the company not to use it in other products where ultralow power consumption is critical. These are my favorite ideas. What are yours?

UPDATE: My friend Kevin Krewell points out that I really should have made a Transformers joke in here. To make up for that omission, I'd like to mention the Monty Python "Pet Conversions" skit, which I was thinking about when I wrote this.

By the way-- if you're looking for something to do in Silicon Valley this weekend, Saturday's Ron Paul rally at Charleston Park near Google in Mountain View, CA begins at 10:00 a.m. I'll be there probably 30 to 45 minutes earlier if anyone wants to drop by and chat about iPhones, Macs, private jets, politics, or anything else I've mentioned here. Or even things I haven't.

Before the rally, I'll be at the Electronics Flea Market at De Anza College in Cupertino. This month's event is sponsored by the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association. Come on over and check out all the new, old, surplus, collectible, neat and junky stuff for sale!

Today the iPhone is the alpha gizmo, the one item of consumer electronics that dominates all the others.

But in 1993, the hot new gizmo was Apple's Newton, and it was a whole different thing.

Not very many people had Newtons. Apple sold fewer Newtons over the whole life of the product than it sold iPhones the evening of June 29.

Also unlike the iPhone, the first Newtons weren't even very useful. Although called "personal digital assistants" (PDAs), using a Newton was significantly more difficult than using a Day-Timer. The original MessagePad had very poor handwriting recognition, and there was no practical alternative to using it, no on-screen or slide-out keyboards. With patience, one could make notes, manage an address book and a calendar, and even send and receive faxes.

But honestly, it wasn't very good at any of these things. The return on the total investment, including the up-front costs and the time and effort of learning to use the device, was not so good.

Apple introduced several minor upgrades of the original MessagePad-- four new models in two and a half years-- addressing some of the hardware and software issues, but it wasn't until the MessagePad 2000 came out in 1997 that the Newton finally realized its full potential.

I had been watching the progress of the Newton very closely, trying to persuade IDT (Integrated Device Technology, where I was working during those early years of the Newton) to bring out a MIPS-architecture processor for this new PDA market. In 1995, I even made my own wooden prototype PDAs to show just how small a PDA could be using the technology of the day-- unaware that Palm's Jeff Hawkins had done the same thing the year before to help get the Palm Pilot project off the ground. (When the Pilot came out in 1996, I was entirely uninterested. Graffiti was a crippling defect, as far as I was concerned.)

I bought a MessagePad 2000 in April of 1997, and it was immediately useful to me. The handwriting recognition engine had been significantly improved on the MessagePad 120, but was still constrained by that model's 20MHz ARM610 processor. On the MP2000's 162MHz StrongARM SA-110 processor, the new recognizer was nearly flawless for me after just a few days of practice. Not everyone had this kind of success, but I usually saw no more than one error per paragraph of text, and it was very easy to correct those errors.

I did have to learn to print a little more neatly than I was used to, but not much. One problem continued to dog me as long as I owned the unit-- when I print a lower-case "g", I start at the top right and draw the circle counter-clockwise, and sometimes fail to close the circle before drawing the descender, especially if I was writing quickly. The Newton's recognizer often interpreted that shape as a lower-case "s".

Anyway, the MP2000 was a great fit for me. In 1996 I had joined the staff of Microprocessor Report. Attending conferences was a big part of my job, and the Newton was the perfect device for taking notes during interviews, presentations, and while visiting exhibition booths. The Newton also helped me manage my schedule. I didn't use it as my primary address book, though. I found it more convenient to use my PowerBook for that purpose, with phone numbers in my cellphone where I could actually use them.

In 1998 I had my MP2000 upgraded to the MessagePad 2100 configuration, which basically just took the RAM configuration from 1M to 4M. That gave me enough room to fiddle around with more of the third-party Newton software that was out there. There was actually a pretty good variety, mostly from very small companies that specialized in Newton software. The Newton wasn't easy to write software for, and Apple didn't support third-party developers as well as they could have, but there was some great software on the market.

I also experimented with using the Newton for Internet access. This worked pretty well with a Farallon Ethernet adapter, but wired Ethernet on a handheld device isn't a great combination. I also tried Metricom's Ricochet wireless Internet adapter. That seemed to work, but I discovered after a few weeks of testing that it was somehow corrupting the data being written to the Newton's flash memory. Either the power draw of the adapter was too great, or the Ricochet's radio transmitter was interfering with the Newton's electronics. I hadn't been making backups of the Newton as regularly as I should have, probably because it had always been almost perfectly reliable, so this Ricochet problem caused me a lot of grief.

Ultimately I decided I didn't have any strong need for Internet access on the Newton. It couldn't substitute for a laptop anyway, so I stopped worrying about it.

By 1999 or so, I stopped experimenting with the Newton entirely; I had a good software setup, the machine did everything I wanted, and it was totally reliable. I used the Newton until 2004, when I left Microprocessor Report. I had a Palm Treo by that time, and still do. It's not a complete Newton substitute by any means, but I can use it to take short notes-- or, conveniently, voice memos-- and it's a better device for calendaring and contacts because it's always with me.

In 2005 I got a Tablet PC (a Motion Computing LE1600) to fill in that note-taking gap at conferences. The Tablet PC handwriting recognizer isn't as good as the MP2000's, but it's tolerable. Tablet PCs are also huge and heavy by comparison with the Newton, but again, that's tolerable. In exchange, a Tablet PC runs a fully-featured operating system (I now have Vista on mine), mainstream applications like Microsoft Outlook and the Firefox browser, and I bought a Sierra Wireless AirCard 850 HSDPA wireless Internet card for it.

I could go on about the design elements Microsoft should have adapted from the Newton into the Tablet PC. I suppose I will, in some future column. Some of these features would be a good fit for a future evolution of the UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC), which today is really just a Tablet PC with a too-small screen. In time, I expect the UMPC will be adapted to be a better fit for its form factor, and some of the Newton's features would help.

So far I've felt no urge to get a UMPC, which some believe bridges the gap between the Newton and Tablet PC. The forthcoming HTC Shift is very tempting, however. I've held one, but I'll have to wait to see what the final features and price are like.

Most people believe the Newton was a huge failure for Apple. I had the chance to ask John Sculley, who was Apple's CEO when the Newton project was launched, about that. He pointed out that although the Newton never paid off its development costs as a product, Apple's early involvement in developing the product category-- particularly its investment in ARM, the company that developed the original Newton microprocessor-- paid off handsomely.

It seems to me that today's technology would support the development of a fairly Newton-like device-- about 12 ounces with a 7" screen, thin and rugged, with integrated wireless Internet or Bluetooth to borrow the connection from a nearby cellphone, good handwriting recognition, and plenty of on-board storage, selling for around $400. I'd buy one, but who else would?

If you had a Newton, or have your own ideas about this product category, why don't you add a comment? Maybe we can get some hardware company interested once again.