My Newton’s Not Dead!
After a long time i have given my old Newton MessagePad 130 access to a power supply unit again. And surprisingly: it still works great. Handwriting recognition and backlight and Newton OS 2.0 … It takes 4 regular ‘walkman’ batteries to make it mobile. The big problem though is that there is no connection between my computer and the newton. It doesn’t do USB or anything even fancier such as Bluetooth. It has a serialport and infrared… Furthermore Apple has discontinued support and software development, e.g. for syncing it with contemporary pim-apps, such as iCal and the Addressbook. So there is no ‘official’ way syncing it via osx with modern macs. But there are some third-party efforts underdone in keeping our newtons on the road and going. Once i have managed to create a physical connection between mac and newton syncing should work. Here is a list of sites devoted to the pda that had all but the support by Steve:
- newtsync.com: syncing the newton with the mac
- WikiWikiNewt: the place for all things newton
- Newted Community: “bleeding green since 1999”
July 23rd, 2005 at 7:29 pm
A good alternative to the rumored iPad is the Nokia 770:
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/770
It runs Linux with a modified Gtk interface. Very sexy :-)
There is a lot of excitement in the gnome community already and the Nokia people are very open minded (www.maemo.org).
It will ship in Fall 2005.
July 23rd, 2005 at 7:48 pm
Ermm… looks interesting. Yet, on the Nokia page there is nothing said about handwriting recognition, though i’ve read somewhere that it has some hwr built-in. i have just played with my old newton (instead of going over neural networks), writing stuff and hoping that the newton is able to recognize it, after such a long time (about 5 years)… and the dark-green brick has not forgotten me - in terms of handwriting. i hope i can set things up, so that i might use it with my current setup.