Newton Poetry

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?

Owning an iPhone and a Newton, it’s always fun to poke around at other mobile operation systems when I get the chance. The other day, I put my stylus on a Palm for the first time, and got to play around with it for a bit.

Gizmodo puts all the major smartphone OSes – RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile, for instance – against each other in a run down of features, pros, and cons.

The only classic mobile OS in the bunch is the “basically dead” Palm OS in the Centro, which is sad, considering (a) the Palm OS looks so dated with the other systems and (b) Palm succeeded where the Newton did not in a lot of ways. Now it’s a dying system.

Funny. I like how the Newton talks in the old Mac OS’s Mr. Roboto voice.

Nice dig at the Zune, too.

It’s interesting to imagine what the Newton could’ve become.

Wikiwikinewt gives us some food for though, including some early prototypes before the Newton came of age.  Or how about the “Cadillac?”  There’s a whole set of Flickr photos dedicated to it:

The web is just full of this stuff.  The Apple Museum has a list of prototypes and codenames.  The Newton’s codename?  The all-too fitting “Batman.”

Here’s what it could’ve looked like:

Sleek and stylish!

The ol’ slab-black, flip-cover look never really went away on the actualy production models, with the obvious exception of the eMate.

And what a shame.  To think that we could be debating Newton styles like we do now with Blackberries or Blackjacks or whatever.

If only…