Digging WAY back in my memory, I did have an
oportunity to see this Siemens desk phone at work.
There was a company in Reston VA that had one of these
(the first Notephone.jpg image) on every desk. Not
only that, but they also had every office rigged with
one of these! Not only that, but every office and all
the halls had infrared network capabilities with each
Newt armed with an infrared network PCMCIA card
(that's what they were called back then). Seems that
your "personallity" settings were in your Newt, and
when you left your office, you could take your Newt
with you and maintain a network connection. Then if
you go to some other office, you could plug your newt
into the desk phone there and everything you need is
in your Newt. Not only that but this company had
written some custom software that allowed you to
identify the wherabouts of any particuar Newt. So, if
you wanted to see where your buddy was, just find his
Newt...Kinda like Comm Badges in Star Trek (as the guy
who gave me the tour liked to say!) These people
rented dozens of newts from us (the company I worked
for years ago) to develop the system. Turns out that
when this company wanted to equip their global
business with these systems (I heard that this company
was poised to purchase 250,000 Newt/Siemens systems
with a yearly purchase of over 50,000 replacement
units with a growth rate of 25%) They went to Apple
and Apple refused to work with this multi-national
company to aid in implementing this system and as a
result, the company dropped all Apple support and went
to HP Omni-Go's (later to go to the CE devices from
HP) HP was only too happy to work with this company.
No sooner did this company decide to switch platforms,
then Apple produced the 2000 series and the Siemens
phone that accompanied it was demoed at this company
as well. It took a year for them to make their
decision, but they dropped Apple mainly due to the
fact that Apple wouldn't bargain. (this isn't the
first company that Apple turned down...I was working
with a race track on developing a custom application
for in-car monitoring services with wireless
transmission to the pit crew of all the car's
information...Apple wouldn't sell them the "guts"
without the cases, so that the Newts would be mounted
in the dash. Neither would Apple give the developers
any information on how to link the internals to the
various monitoring devices on the car...they also went
with HP!)
It makes me wonder, was Apple EVER serious in this
hand held market? or was it just a hobby that got out
of hand? These two deals alone would have meant over a
half a million units sold with almost a quarter
million each year!
go figure!
Personally, I don't think that Apple ever expected it
to be as popular as it was and didn't have the
production facilities in place to handle serious
sales...
Ed
web/gadget guru
--- Lui Frimmel <luifri@atnet.at> wrote:
> >> they made different models for different kinds of
> phone lines.
> >
> >I know, as far as I understood you saw was
> >http://www.msu.edu/~luckie/notephone.gif
> >and the phone that blew my mind was
> >http://www.msu.edu/~luckie/siemens.jpg
> >So does anybody know any details about this one, it
> looks definitely a lot
> >more advanced than the first one, with a 2x00
> incorporated instead of a 1x0.
>
> The Siemens NotePhone came with NOS 1.11, (OMP, NOS
> wasnt upgradeable and a
> 2400 modem) -
> a simple analogous phone, no sophisticated features.
> I had some contact with Siemens about upgrading
> around end 96, no they
> didnt, no there wasnt
> another NotePhone they did. The 2nd pict looks very
> alike a homebuilt
> combination with
> another device ;-)
>
> Lui
>
=====
this is a temporary sig file until I can figure out a more clever one to use
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