Newton Poetry

So you went to an Apple store, made your purchase, sold your soul to some wireless carrier, and now you have tons of free apps downloaded and your voicemail is all set up. You’re an iPhone 3G owner. What makes you so special? It might be that you don’t have an Apple Newton MessagePad to play around with.

Here are ten eleven reasons to sell your 3G and take up the ten-years-abandoned Newton platform for fun and recreation:

1. It’s cheaper. The Newton MessagePad 1×0 series may cost you $15-30, while the 2×00 series might cost you $100-200. But that’s it. Except for wireless cards and the extra stylus, there’s no “plan” or “rate” to buy in to. You pay for it once. That’s it.
2. The batteries last longer. Way longer. Like, weeks longer. I’ve noticed that my 3G iPhone can last up to two days with light usage, but in the end I still have to plug it in. My Newton 110? I’ve lasted a month on the same Sanyo Eneloop batteries. No color and no wifi help, of course, but the point still stands.
3. You can fax. Faxing may be on its way out, or at least moving to the electronic world, but the MessagePad’s ability to fax – with the special modem – can be an advantage if (Steve forbid) wifi or cell towers ever went down. It could happen, and faxing lets you use the tried-and-true phone lines to do your communicating. Someone may release a faxing iPhone app, but in the meantime, your MessagePad has the market covered.
4. No in-store activation required. No lines, either, and if you use eBay, it’s not as scarce as you think.
5. It’s more rugged. Drop your iPhone and step on it. Now drop your MessagePad and step on it. Which would survive the fall and subsequent stomping? Place your bets.
6. Newtons qualify as “underground.” Retro. Rare. Counter-culture. Whatever you want to call it, the Newton fills the “not-everyone-has-one-so-mine-is-cool” gap the iPhone 3G left behind. Before, the iPhone 1.0 was the rare species, eliciting looks and whispers when someone whipped one out. Now, Apple is selling tons of them. Which means, like the iPod, the “coolness” factor dips a bit. Not so with your MessagePad. You could probably count on one hand the number of people who own one in your 50-mile radius. Kids these days love their retro and throwback technology – what serves that purpose better than a Newton?
7. It still has fun games on it. Every cell phone in the world has Tetris and chess and tic-tac-toe. So does your Newton. If your gaming style is “simple” over “Crash Bandicoot Racing,” keep your Newton around. Many games can be had for free.
8. You’ll never have activation problems. Maybe an error message now and again. But nothing on the scale of the “iPocalypse.”
9. You already have a system that works. Why switch now? If your MessagePad fits your GTD needs already, switching to the iPhone involves setting up a whole new system. I, for one, am still trying to decide on what flavor of to-do app I want to use on my 3G. Save yourself the hassle.
10. No AT&T involved. This goes along with point one, but really – any situation where you can avoid giant nation-wide media and communication carriers is a chance to show your shutzpah. Those of us who settled on buying an iPhone are still grappling with the catatonic depression that goes along with signing up with AT&T. And the fact that we had to wait in long lines to do so only strengthens the insult. Do your own thing. Hold your Newton tight.
11. Your Newton is a “project” device. This is what originally drew me to the MessagePad. Setting up wifi and Bluetooth, sending and receiving e-mails, playing around with third-party apps and games, even syncing with OS X – the Newton gives you weekend projects that satisfy your inner DIY’er. The iPhone? Too easy. Unless you’re an app developer or a jailbreaker – in which case, Mr. Jobs would like to have a word with you – the iPhone is a device of convenience and comfort. You don’t even need Apple’s permission to make applications for the Newton. All you need is knowledge of NewtonScript, an inner drive, and a mild case of masochism.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m loving my iPhone. Just the camera and the GPS are worth the madness that I lived through that Friday in July.

Anything I haven’t thought of? Have a different point of view? Let me know in the comments.

Macworld UK reports that Greenpeace is pretty pleased about Apple’s new environmentally-friendlier iPods, announced at Tuesday’s “Let’s Rock” event.

A few years ago, Greenpeace launched a frontal assault on Apple’s supposed lack of electronics recycling and “iPoison” prevention. The group took Apple to task for not doing enough to ease the “toxic chemicals” and “short life spans” of iPods and Macs. Even today, despite Apple’s progress, Greenpeace remains vigilant:

“Greenpeace is on guard, watching future Apple announcements and holding it accountable,” [Casey Harrell, Greenpeace International campaigner] said. “What we’d really like for Christmas is to see Apple remove toxic chemicals from all its products, and announce a free, global recycling scheme. Now, that would make a very tasty green Apple indeed!”

We should all applaud Apple for removing a lot of the poisonous junk from their iPods and Macs, but I’ve argued that Apple’s problem isn’t a lack of environmental stewardship – it’s that they don’t brag enough about their efforts. Now that Steve is pointing out Apple’s work on the e-waste front at these events, their “green” image can only improve.

This is a good example of the good things that can come from customer and organizational pressure from the bottom up: Apple had a decent environmental record, but thanks to heavy lobbying (and a board member named Al Gore), we can probably look forward to more checklists like the one Steve Jobs showed on Tuesday.

It’s on.

That low-life crank Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, has been leaving comments (here, here, and here) on Newton Poetry, and I’m tired of the abuse.

Okay, not really. It’s actually “Fake Steve Ballmer,” who is the *ahem* last man standing in the battle of fake technology powerhouses.

The Fake Ballmer site was a result of Dan Lyon’s own “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” blog, which – in its hey-day – was one of the funniest and spot-on commentaries in technology. Fake Steve thrashed the real Steve Ballmer on a near-constant basis. Now Fake Ballmer is getting his revenge.

What made the Fake Steve site so funny was Steve Jobs real personality: all Zen-like and simple one minute, and firing people in a hissy fit the next. Steve Ballmer’s personality makes for a funny satire, too, but it’s a little too easy (developers, anyone?). People see Ballmer as an oaf and Bill Gates’s thug, and Microsoft is always an easy target.

I’m guessing is that Fake Ballmer is actually an Apple fan or Microsoft critic (or both), because by using Fake Ballmer to defend Microsoft’s evil, he or she is actually showing how silly it all sounds.

But it’s still good fun, and we welcome Mr. Ballmer’s comments anytime here at Newton Poetry. No Uncle Fester jokes – I promise.

The madness continues, but us AAPL investors have to be feeling better than we were just a few months ago.

Conventional wisdom says buy on the rumor, and sure enough – after the iPhone 3G announcement, AAPL stock took a bit of a dive. It’s been bouncing back and forth (with the markets, apparently, in red and orange above), now resting at $173 as of today’s closing.

Apple is in good condition, and with the iPhone price drop, I can only imagine things will get better. And others agree (including a blogger I read regularly over at The Simple Dollar). The final pricing point doesn’t matter. What’ll be interesting is to see how the stock performs come July 11, when lines outside Apple stores will surely beat last year’s. I hope to be at our own Ann Arbor store that morning. If it’s anything like the store’s opening, it should be a fun day, indeed.

For all the speculation and gambling and non-news that gets thrown around in regards to Apple, what matters most is the ability of the company to churn out high-quality computers and phones and music players that people want. And they are doing that.

If, as king-hell capitalists believe, a company’s stock price is the true measure of its worth, than Apple is in good condition. Says one analyst (thanks to Reuters):

Analyst David Bailey also raised his target on the stock to $220 from $185, and said Apple should be able to increase its available iPhone subscriber base by more than 80 percent this year due to aggressive expansion into international markets.

Will all that optimism change should that Jobs guy leave the company?

Who can tell? The experiment marches on, anyway.

I’m a public relations professional by day, and I’ve got to tell you: I admire the way Apple gets all the headlines for their events.

I noticed this Monday when my iGoogle pops up and the WWDC 2008 buzz was everywhere to be found (above). Apple’s PR juggernaut can’t be stopped, even when Steve Jobs is looking under the weather.

One goal of public relations is to get your message out and to communicate with your “publics” (shareholders, employees, customers, etc.). Another is to get “inches” out of the new press, which amounts to free advertising. Apple does this without batting an eye. Oh, to be a PR pro in the Cupertino halls.

Do you know how hard it is to stare at this and wait for Apple to upload their Quicktime video of the WWDC 08 keynote?

Do you?

I told myself: no checking the blogs, no checking the live feeds. Wait until you get home and watch the keynote via Apple’s Quicktime upload. That way, you’re watching it unfold like everyone who was there.

But no. No video uploaded yet as of 5:42 p.m. Eastern time Monday night.

C’mon…

Stressed about the “one more thing” that will be announced this Monday, June 9 at the Worldwide Developers Conference? Fear not. We have a round-up of rumors, damned lies, and fun games to play while you’re waiting for the next big thing.

A Newton 2.0? That’s on the list, kind of.

WWDC ’08 Keynote Bingo. Ars Technica always does a nice job at this. I’m hoping for the top two corner pieces.

Snow Leopard strays from PPC. This one was first featured at TUAW.com, but the Cult of Mac guys really touch on what a change Mac users have seen from the days of OS 8 and 9 to now. In short, “The Mac is dead. Long live OS X.”

From .Mac to MobileMe. John Gruber did some snooping and found the new domain names Apple registered. People have been bitching about .Mac for years (I had it for a year, and it was…eh), so this could be pretty exciting.

WWDC banner pictures. That’s right. They’re up, and the speculation is flying. OS X iPhone, anyone?

Newton 2.0. This one has been like Lazarus. A new MessagePad in the form of a Mac tablet? Supposedly, there’s a 50/50 chance. But we’ll see. After all, Apple is shopping for handwriting engineers.

Oh, and that rumor. You know, the one everyone knows is coming. And the iPhone 1.0 is undergoing drought conditions. What else could it be?

I’ve decided not to participate in any of the live blogging feeds or constant refreshing of Apple news sites. I’m going to wait until the Quicktime video is released (which I watch faithfully anyway), just so it can all feel new and “just announced” to me. Should be fun.

Something along the lines of what the Cult of Mac guys are thinking: that the 3G iPhone will just be a warm-up.

It’s kind of like right before last year, when the iPhone was first announced. The buzz was feverishly high. Remember that? And all those mockups and predictions came across the blogs, and everyone was going nuts.

Then Steve Jobs gave the demo, and it was better than anybody came close to imagining.

I think WWDC on June 9 will be just like that. All this hyper-excitement over the new iPhone (and well-deserved, I might mention), when all this time Jobs and his crew are planning something that blows us all away. As usual.

Daring Fireball did some digging on something called “Mobile Me,” and I think that might be the key everyone is ignoring (except Gruber, of course). But who knows? No one but a few Apple employees.

So a week from now, I have a feeling we’ll all have something new and exciting to talk about besides a 3G iPhone.

That’s all I got.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Apple iMac.

I’m lucky enough to own one of the Bondi Blue beauties; it’s mostly my finance and gaming (WarCraft II) machine. I like to mess around with Photoshop on it, and I also got a copy of Adobe’s proto-web WYSIWYG editor PageMill to play with.

I’ve got mine running OS 9, but they originally shipped with OS 8, I think. It’s my truly “classic” machine, and also my Newton MessagePad hub. It still runs like a dream, humming along at 233 MHz with 160k of RAM.

So thanks, Steve Jobs, and thanks, Jon Ive, for bringing such a wonderful machine into being.

At times, Steven Levy’s tone in The Perfect Thing: How the iPod shuffles commerce, culture, and coolness winks and nods at the reader as many Apple-inspired blogs do: he’s one of us, and he’s intimate with the subject.

Levy’s voice makes The Perfect Thing a breeze to read, and not just because of the book’s modest lenght. In revealing the software, hardware, and philosophical origins of the most popular MP3 player on the planet, he easily makes the case for the iPod’s overwhelming popularity.

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