My iPhone app Instaviz is a little homage to the whole Newton philosophy of minimal interface. It uses Newton-like shape recognition to convert shapes and links into beautifully laid-out graphs. Do check it out!

First off, its fit-for-purpose GUI design that tightly integrates gestures and stylus operation is what creates a bond with users. The fact that it grows to know your unique handwriting style takes you beyond a mere bond and into intimacy.

The Wifi and Bluetooth implementations really bring the Newton into the 21st Century. When the Newton is combined with a Personal Web Server or IIS, one can browse the Web, gain access to files on a desktop and install new packages completely wirelessly.

I used to worry a lot about synchronisation because I was used to using desktop PIM applications at the time I acquired my first Newton in 2002. But I found that once I got my head around putting a decent no-desktop required back up regime in place, I was untethered and free.

A journalist in Germany has hooked a Nokia Cardphone 2 to a Newton and uses it for SMS and cell phone calls.

Is it perfect? The only thing that prevents a Newton from becoming a desktop or laptop replacement in a work environment is a lack of MS Office and PDF support. However others will hanker for colour support, better web page rendering and flash movie support. Smartphones generally beat the Newton for pocketability but then their screens are so small that they become impracticable for taking decent notes in a meeting or lecture. Anyway, a Newton is about the size of a standard Franklin Day Planner which are still in common use even though they might sport the latest smartphone.

For most things one can generally get by without them.

What I liked about it was that the OS never tried to be a desktop OS. It was designed as a handheld, write-on-the-screen device. The eMate, although built with an integrated keyboard, was never a really good writing machine for this reason – you had to take your hand off the keyboard to tap the screen too often. (This same frustration can be seen using the AlphaSmart Dana. They are great for straight writing, but using the handheld functionality is less than appealing on that bulky a device.) The Newton’s detachable keyboard created a system that was handheld, but allowed for large-scale data entry when needed. (I would love it if my iPhone would pair with one of my BlueTooth keyboards for the same effect.)

Jared covered the later HWR system that came with the 2.0 OS – that made things much better. On your Newton, you could write as ink (fast!), then read and even convert to text later. There is no fast data entry on any handheld today – you have to type your thumbs off, or use a Palm/WinCE and hope the ink looks vaguely similar to real letters, because nothing is reading the gestures behind them. That’s why the proliferation of laptops at meetings and conferences. Tablets are not handheld – they are lap- or desk- or arm-held, and that is quite a different matter. No one who carries around a letter-sized legal pad thinks of their setup as handheld – it’s just portable. So why do Tablet users think they can compare Tablets to the iPhone or Palm? Every time I show a Tablet user my iPhone, they say “oh, but my tablet reads my handwriting” or similar. But it’s not in your pocket! With the Newton, you could (barely – and only in some pants) carry it in your pocket. We got used to carrying them everywhere, but the size was just enough to be irritating. I would sometimes wear a sport coat just to have the larger pockets.

But it was all worth it. If they had been updating the system over the years (so that it would sync, pair with BlueTooth, connect via WiFi without having a card sticking out of the side, and work with a SIP client, for starters) I’d be ready to send back my iPhone.

Well, maybe not – but almost!

What ultimately doomed the Newton was that it was bulky, expensive, and had poor synchronization software by comparison to later devices such as the Palm Pilot. The handwriting recognition eventually evolved into a decent system, however it never quite got over the bad press associated with it’s original HWR software.

The Newton’s first generation handwriting recognition system (Calligrapher), had to be trained and was prone to mistakes. The subsequent replacement developed by Apple (Rosetta) was much improved. The company that owned Calligrapher licensed it to Microsoft (as Transcriber), and it wound up on the very first Windows CE devices. So you can imagine the irony of reading reviews touting the strength of the Pocket PC HWR compared to the Newton, when in fact it was the same engine that had originally spawned so much ridicule.

I still use my Newton 2100 to this day, primarily to run as an elegant RPN calculator. Design calculations that contributed to several generations of chip lithography tools, have flowed through a Newton. It’s not too far of a stretch to say that the chips in your computer and other devices today were enabled in a small but fundamental way by an ancient PDA.

Sadly, the backlighting has lost it’s brightness over the years and the NiMH batteries barely will hold a charge. With the advent of the iPhone and the App Store, there are some alternative scientific apps out there now. But nothing quite compares to some of the brilliant apps that ran on the Newton.