From: Chris Ruprecht (chris_at_seconnect.net)
Date: Thu Feb 05 2004 - 17:13:11 PST
Hello everybody!
I have been on this list on and off since it's inception, made a few
comments here of there, told people some good and something the wrong
things and have always been a faithful Newton and Mac user.
I have also defended my newton against the all so bad world, at work
and in private. But I have noticed in the last year, that I use my
Newton less and less. The battery isn't what it used to be - this
MP2100 has it's original rechargeable battery pack since December 1997
- and it has gotten too heavy. So it stayed home, more and more. I
still dragged it to work every now and then to face the laughter from
people with sleek iPAQs and Dell Axims - laughing at my 'brick'. I
could impress them by showing off the HWR and the nice built-in
utilities such as the loan calculator and the metric converter.
Well, about 6 months ago, they gave me an Axim and I hated it. I mostly
actually hated the stylus, holding that thing made my hand hurt. So I
resisted it as much as I could. I liked the iPAQs much better, their
screen is a little bigger and the stylus a bit better. Then, about
three weeks ago, I acquired an old iPAQ 3635. It runs Pocket PC 2000 -
and it's ... well ... cr*ppy. It has, however, a color screen, so you
can take your family pictures with you and show them around. It has no
HWR to speak of though and I wasn't getting along with it, too well.
Two weeks ago, I then acquired an iPAQ 3850 as well as an 5450. Now,
we're talking! The 5450 is an impressive piece of hardware, quite
capable of taking on a Newton :). I tried the HWR - and it works just
as well as the one on the Newton. I had to set up the letter shapes,
but the recognition is almost flawless. It also has built-in ethernet
and Bluetooth, the first works very well for me, the latter, I have no
idea what to do with as I do not have any other Bluetooth devices.
But I was still missing some applications - and no, I'm not going to
pay $14.95 here and $19.95 there for all these utilities, the Newton
has built in. One of my favorite apps is the loan calculator. So, last
night, I sat down in front of my _PC_ notebook (this message is sent
from a PowerBook :), and downloaded the free embedded development
environment for the Pocket PC from M$ - something for FREE from Bill
Gates ?!?!??. After installing everything, I fired up Embedded VB and
began too draw stuff on the screen - I had no idea where to start or
what to do. The package isn't intuitive, but after a while, I got going
and actually built the loan calculator app from the Newton from
scratch. And hey, it worked!
Now, I had tried before, several times, to do anything useful with NTK
but never got my mind wrapped around it and never actually achieved
anything - despite all the docs from Apple and the "Programming for the
Newton" book.
With this is mind, I will probably try to write what every Newton app
I'm still missing on the iPAQ, myself. Thus retiring the Newton after
being a Newton user for almost 10 years.
Now, does that make me a bad guy? Have I had too much influences from
the 'dark' side? I hope not, as I still do not think, M$ is a good
thing in it's current incarnation.
But what are the alternatives?
I have had a look at Linux on the iPAQ. Linux hasn't made it to the
desktop yet - the Linux community is still trying to convince people to
use OpenOffice/KOffice and so on instead of M$ office. That's just not
going to happen. I believe that Linux will give M$ a good run for their
money in the server market with player like IBM and Novell (who's
that?) backing it, but M$ has won the battle of the Desktop. Linux on a
handheld is just impossible. HWR is non existent, apps are equally non
existent, development is extremely cumbersome and nobody seems to be
really interested.
Palm, some might say ... but I view the Palm Pilot as a glorified
address book. I admit, I have not looked at the later versions of their
OS, namely 4 and 5, but I have not heard anything exciting either, and
Palm OS 5 has been out for a while now.
If anybody can point me to other alternatives ... I'm all ears ... for
now, I will be in the iPAQ camp, still reading NewtonTalk, still
marveling over how far ahead the Newton _was_, still keeping my MP2100
around, charged up, ready to go, should the iPAQ fail me.
Best regards,
Chris
-- Chris Ruprecht Network Grunt and Bit Pusher extraordinaíre -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries List FAQ/Etiquette/Terms: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
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