Newton Poetry

“The iPod proved that $500 gadgets can sell. The Newton showed that $1,000 gadgets don’t.”

– John Gruber of Daring Fireball, right before Macworld 2003.

Let’s say the improbable happens during the iPhone 3.0 media event today and Apple releases the rumored 10″ iTablet.

Are we then looking at the proper heir to the Newton MessagePad?

Back when I first started Newton Poetry, a few months after the iPhone came out, people were talking Newton 2.0 in the form of a larger-form iPod Touch: 10″ screen, iPhone OS, touch-screen input, etc. Even before that, as far back as 2002, rumors told of the Return of the MessagePad in some form or another.

Now the rumors are back, with evidence to boot, and meanwhile the iPod Touch/iPhone gets an update from Apple that could make its usability as close to the Newton’s as ever before.

Think about it: cut and paste, to-do and notes syncing, some kind of premium app store for business-centric applications.

Perhaps the only questions that remain are which rumored features will Apple leave out and wait to install next time? Over time, the iPhone will surely eclipse the Newton in its feature set (it may have already).

For us Newton users, how many features does it take for us to accept the iPhone as the successor to the Newton?

There are still Newton-like features missing on the touch screen platforms: a wide-open application base, handwriting recognition, innovative file system, and kick-ass battery life. Newton users never have to worry about Apple rejecting a great app, or of losing service thanks to AT&T’s sub-par network.

But still. Eventually, Newton users will have fewer and fewer excuses not to make an upgrade of some kind. If the very thing Newton die-hards are looking for – a bigger iPod Touch with full PIM capabilities – comes out in the next few months, will a lack of handwriting recognition be enough to hold off on making the purchase? What will be left lacking?

The Newton has more personality than devices twice its size and half its age. Part of it is its pioneering spirit, and part of it is its clever UI. Is that enough to make people hang on to their eMates?

Granted, no solution works for everyone, which is why some Newton users will never accept a system that (a) doesn’t allow for HWR and (b) features a crap-tacular battery life. The simplicity and intuitiveness of the Newton OS has lasting power, too. Apple may have had a hard time figuring out what to do with their device, but Newton users have no such hesitations.

Hell, with an iTablet, we still don’t know if we’ll get some kind of watered-down Mac OS X or a beefed-up iPhone OS.

Maybe some of my co-MessagePad fans can shed some light on this thing for me. Is this idea of the giant-sized iPod Touch enough to satisfy what you’ve been missing since 1998? Does anyone think an Apple tablet/netbook thingamabob gets released at this iPhone 3.0 event? Will some Newton users be forever locked in a world that existed 10 years ago?

Let me know in the comments.

Since you all were nice enough to share a little bit about yourselves last week, it’s my turn.

My name is Dave Lawrence. I’m a 27-year-old communications specialist for a local credit union in my hometown of Jackson, MI – a smallish city along the I-94 corridor about an hour and a half west of Detroit.

I graduated with a degree in English/journalism from Adrian College and came back home to find my job.

While I worked with Macs at the campus newspaper, I didn’t get serious about them until the winter of 2005, when I bought my first computer – and first Mac: an iBook G4. Since then, I haven’t looked back. My collection has grown to include an iBook G3 clamshell, an iMac G3, two Mac SEs, a PowerMac G4, an iMac G4, and – most recently – a PowerMac G3.

My first Newton came in December 2006, and was more or less something to mess around with. I felt you can’t have a truly righteous Apple collection without a Newton, so I bought a MessagePad 110. Later, in the fall of 2007, I launched Newton Poetry. I also have an eMate.

Besides Macs and Newtons, I love to travel, read, watch “The Office,” head out on the town with friends, and get involved in my community. I’m in a local Rotary club, am on the board for a recycling non-profit, and get involved in politics whenever I can.

I’ve made several life-changing trips in the past few years, including driving down Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, taking the northern route from Michigan to Seattle, and exploring Revolutionary War sites in New England. This summer, my big trip will include a cross-Canada drive to Vancouver for the Worldwide Newton Conference.

I do Newton Poetry because the Newton community fascinates me, and the device is so much fun to use. There’s still an audience out there who craves information about the Newton – how to make it work, how to connect it with modern Macs, where the Newton ideal will take us in the years ahead.

Also, I love to fiddle with computers and projects, and Newton Poetry gives me an outlet to write about those projects. What I found was that people who, say, want to install an Airport card in their iBook, like to have help as they do it. As a result, that post is one of my most popular.

There’s tons more about me, of course, so feel free to browse my personal blog, follow me on Twitter, or hang on and see where else Newton Poetry takes us.

I had so much fun creating Mac iPhone wallpapers last time that I went back and collected a bunch of classic Mac pictures to do it again.

You can see my entire collection on my Flickr site, or head to the iPhone Wallpapers group to see a bunch more.

Nothing says “classy” like a 68k Mac on your home screen, eh?

Just a fun heads-up: I created a bunch of Macintosh-inspired iPhone wallpapers over at my Flickr account and on the iPhone Wallpapers Flickr group. I took a bunch of recent Macs, like the G4 Cube above, and paired them with their marketing slogans, or a simple label, all on a clean white background.

Now you can carry around your favorite G3, G4, G5, or Intel Mac around with your iPhone. My iPhone is sporting the PowerMac G4 right now, just because I love the slogan so much.

Enjoy!

What’s up with the personal digital assistant (PDA) these days?

Says one blogger, they may be obsolete already.

Over at Charlie’s Diary, author Charlie Stross says even his HP iPAQ is on its last legs in terms of usefulness:

Yet despite delivering the initial promise of the Newton — yes, you can scribble anywhere on the screen and it will decode your notes; yes, it does the agenda and contacts and notepad stuff well; it also takes voice memos; it’s got a decent word processor and spreadsheet on board; it’s a desert topping and a floor wax — it’s fundamentally obsolete.

It turns out that people don’t want that stuff in a notepad-shaped machine. What they want is a mobile phone that does the address book/agenda stuff — and is an entertainment gadget besides, with a camera and music player built in.

Kind of like what the iPhone offers, right?

Now that most smart phones, the iPhone included, come with contact and appointment applications, is there a need for a dedicated machine to handle day-to-day business tasks? The numbers seem to say “no,” and the popularity of the iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry back that up. Even as far back as 2006, the outlook for PDAs looked grim.

Shucks, even my 30 GB iPod video comes with some of the functionality, at least in terms of reference data, of a PDA. What do you think? Is the PDA idea extinct?

Something to think about: if Apple were to come out with some sort of tablet, would you buy one?

Say you’re a Newton user, and this new iTablet comes with everything you’ve been dreaming of. Would you abandon your Newton?

Discuss in the comments section. It’s something I had to think about when I bought my iPhone 3G: would my Newton get much use when the Jesus Phone comes along (answer: it hasn’t)?

So what say you: would you buy an Apple tablet? What would you use it for?

If first impressions are everything, then MobileMe never had a chance.

After I bought my iPhone 3G, I signed up for the trial MobileMe account. Back then, it was only a 60-day free trial, but Apple soon added 30 days onto that, and then 30 days onto that, after MobileMe’s launch arrived like a lead balloon.

The idea seemed swell enough: sync your Address Book, iCal, and Mail settings and entries with the ever-present Cloud, and your iPhone. But since July, I’ve run into more problems than solutions, and MobileMe has been a frustrating mess.

My free trial is up on Monday, Dec. 8. I’m going to cancel my account.

Looking back, I never really needed MobileMe to begin with. Because I plug my iPhone into my Mac almost every night, any new entries in either iCal or Address Book get synced each way – from the iPhone to my Mac, and from my Mac to my iPhone. I don’t need the “push” capabilities MobileMe claimed to offer because my syncing schedule was fast enough.

It’s too bad. Apple had a big uphill effort replacing the .Mac service. MobileMe seemed like a decent-enough resolution to everyone’s complaints against .Mac: not much storage, lackluster syncing, no star features that made it seem worth the $99 annual subscription. With it’s modern browser interface and over-the-air syncing, MobileMe looked great on paper. In practice, however, it failed to live up to my expectations.

Maybe it was a lack of habit, but I never found myself missing MobileMe when I wasn’t using it (which was often). If I used my iPhone and Mac for business, the cloud syncing might seem like a bigger deal. But I had a system down, and it worked just fine for me.

The one feature that did catch my eye was the photo sharing galleries. My friend’s wedding photographer put together a beautiful presentation (the subjects helped) using MobileMe’s slideshow capabilities. But again: I don’t really need it. Flickr works just fine as a photo-sharing environment for me. I can make slideshows with Flickr that look fine for my needs. I’m not a wedding photographer. I don’t need anything fancy.

Another thing that bothered me? The fact that iDisk iDisk Sync [thanks commenters!] takes up the 10 GB of space from my hard drive. Maybe I’m a rare case, but when I launch iDisk, it takes away whatever space is available away from my Mac’s “available” space. Why store things on a fragile cloud when my hard drive works just fine? I love the idea behind iDisk, but my iBook is cramped enough without taking that additional 10 GB away.

Apple’s solution? Don’t use iDisk Sync.

The launch didn’t help things. We all remember that, right? The big outage that first weekend. How it took weeks and weeks of Apple tinkering to get even basic services like e-mail up and running for all MobileMe users. For a while there, MobileMe seemed like a big embarrassing misshap for Apple – right up there with the big system outage for the iPhone 3G’s launch. That kind of thing can leave a bad taste in the mouth. I guess it’s never gone away for me.

Part of me is skeptical about this “cloud computing” stuff. I understand that Google seems to have it down, barring Gmail outages, and – lord bless them – Microsoft is working on their own cloud syncing projects. But Google apps like Gmail are hooked up to my Mail.app, which runs from my desktop, and I don’t often make appointments or add contacts through a web browser. That stuff lives on my Mac. I like that I can edit a contact’s information on my iPhone and the change gets logged in Address Book in OS X. There’s no extra log-in-to-the-web-service involved.

If I had several Macs strung out over several locations, with only my iPhone in common, the idea behind MobileMe could come in handy. Backing up my data to the cloud? Sure. Do it all the time. But easy and reliable syncage still seems to be a giant Work In Progress. I’m not yet impressed.

So thanks for the couple of free months, Apple, but I’m saying “no thanks” to MobileMe. Maybe some day I’ll find a use for it – one where I can justify renewing my subscription. Right now, though, I can’t see any good reason to keep MobileMe around. It’s either been a thorn in my side or a non-starter, and life’s too short for either of those.

Here I thought J.D. Power and Associates only ranked cars. It turns out, however, that smartphones are also on their to-rate list.

And guess who’s number one?

Apple’s iPhone ranked above RIM and every other smartphone maker in this year’s Business Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study. Apple wasted no time in bragging about the accolade: I spotted their full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday (above). And why not? J.D. Power and Associates ranks “ease of operation” the highest in its study (27% of the final score), and what’s easier to use than the iPhone?

Says the company in their press release:

Apple ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 778 on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the ease of operation, physical design and handset feature factors. BlackBerry manufacturer RIM (703) and Samsung (701) follow Apple in the rankings.

The ad appeared on the back page of the A section of the Wall Street Journal, and aimed its message directly at enterprise professionals. Apple’s ad highlights the “enterprise support” and “hundreds of of amazing business apps in the App Store.” Any questions about Apple trying to attract the suit-and-tie crowd have been answered.

And here some fools think Apple is scared of RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry (money quote: “the number of shortcomings in the iPhone 3G far outweigh those found in the Storm.” Right-o).

With great rankings like those from J.D. Power and Associates, what’s there to be scared of?

Pretty cool: an app called PhoneGap lets you turn your web site into an iPhone/iTouch app using nothing but your site’s existing HTML and JavaScript. PhoneGap is:

written in Objective-C and allows developers to embed their web app (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) in Webkit within a native iPhone app. We’re big advocates of the Open Web and want JavaScript developers to be able to get access iPhone features such as a spring board icon, background processing, push, geo location, camera, local sqlLite and accelerometers without the burden of learning Objective-C and Cocoa.

Right now, PhoneGap gives your almost-app access to the iPhone’s accelerometer and geo location services, but camera and vibration options are pending. Head to their Google Group to learn more about the project.

Seems like a neat idea to me. There are already PhoneGap success stories, where Apple has approved their App Store submittal. Is there any way to create a Newton-like shell on a web site (kind of like this blog does) and then throw it onto the iPhone with PhoneGap? One can dream.

[via Webmonkey.]