According to Defying Gravity, Apple rushed the Newton to market
because they feared competition (heh heh). Apple did rush to maket with
an (IMO) not-matured, underpowered product (underpowered for something
they wanted to claim, "could read you handwriting" if not other things)
By the time they had a mature product (N2100) and pulled the plug,
competition had only begun to materialize in a serious way with Palm and
WinCE, and the others just seem like bit players to me - important none
the less, but bit players.
Now, what if Apple hadn't announced the Newton too early at the
computer show I forget the name of, and had waited until they had
perfected things, or found a faster processor at the beginning, waited
until they had Rosetta done, optimized the HWR algorithms to use on-chip
cache, etc? Would the competition that Apple apparently feared have
actually materialized, and if it did, would it have lasted?
Over the first several iterations of WinCE, MS has shown itself to be
rather bewildered by the idea that a PDA is *not a desktop computer*,
and now seems to be trying to jump on the media bandwagon with "Yes, but
you can watch Britney Spears in full color while walking down the
street, and bash you head into a lamp-post.." Palm appears to be moving
ever-so-slowly to a faster processor.. I'm not sure what the other ones
are doing (or if they're are really any left). What kinds of PDAs were
around at the time the Newton was introduced?
Jim
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