From: Martin Howard (mvhoward_at_mac.com)
Date: Thu Jul 29 2004 - 14:07:28 PDT
Two days ago, I got my first Newton device, a MessagePad 2100. Having
spent
about two months humming and haring about whether to get a PDA or not
(pen
and paper and TiBook go a long way) and having researched the entire
market
(including $800 high-end, Japanese imports) I'd decided that the
cost-performance ratio just wasn't out there. That is, until I stumbled
across a page (not Slashdot's) about people still using Newtons and how
an
active hacker community had "ported" Newton technology into the 21st
century. WiFi, Bluetooth, web browser, email, sync to OS X
iApplications... it did everything I needed it to. The fact that I'd
drooled over every image of the Newton I could find when it came out
(while
I was a poor student and couldn't buy one if I'd sold my mother) only
influenced me the slightest.
I've quickly discovered that while the Newton certainly does live on,
it's
much more of a tinkerer's and hacker's device than the currently
available,
mass-market PDAs. Yes, it does to WiFi, it does do Bluetooth, but
unless
you're willing to spend hours sifting through FAQs, mailing list
archives,
and googling for lost documentation (with 8 out of 10 links being out of
date and no longer functioning), this is not the PDA for you. Even with
documentation, you need to spend a lot of time mucking about and testing
things to get them to work for you.
I spent probably ten hours trying to get Bluetooth and WiFi working.
Along
the way, I discovered that my DB-9F to mini DIN-8M adaptor was wired
wrong,
and I had to buy the connectors, 8-strand wire, and a $6 soldering iron
to
make one. Then I discovered that there is a difference between packages
installed on an external card, and those installed internally. I also
discovered that there are multiple versions of Newton Internet Enabler
(NIE)
and they are not always labelled very clearly. At some point, I was
getting
very wierd error messages, because I had some components from one
version
and other components from another version. Everytime I fire up
"Internet
Setup", it still tells me that I have old settings and would I like to
update them, then crashes when I try to update them. I have no clue
where
they are stored, so I cannot delete them either. I've gotten used to
just
answering "No" at the prompt.
My WiFi card is an Orinoco Classic Gold PC-CARD, still available new
from
Amazon.com (at least, as of the 22nd July 2004). I paid $56.99 for
mine,
which is more than the Lucent Silver cards go for on eBay, but I get 1
year
warranty and it works with 128 bit WEP encryption. Be careful if you
buy
from Amazon: they have two cards very similarly named and the one you
want
is called *Classic* Gold. The other one is a CardBus device and won't
work.
The IEEE 802.11b Wave LAN driver (version 1.08a) identifies the card as
a
Lucent WaveLAN card and works nicely (although I can only use channel 1
--
despite the web page claiming that all features are enabled during a 30
day
trial period).
My set up is as follows: Newton (Orinoco Classic Gold) talks to an
Airport
Express, which in turn is wired to an Airport Basestation (Dual
Ethernet:
Snow), which chats to the Internet through a DSL connection. I run the
Airport Express as a subnet, since the old dual-ethernet basestation
doesn't
support WDC. The Newton can talk to both devices, although I only run
it
off the Airport Express for the sake of convenience.
Bluetooth was less successful. I got the AmbiCom Air2Net BT2000E
Compact
Flash card with PC-CARD adaptor. It works nicely with Blunt (be sure to
read the bit in Blunt's manual pages about how the test function does
*not*
work with the AmbiCom cards!). My card has the black antenna, the
packaging
calls it a BT2000-CF, but the TiBook identify it as a BT2000E, so
that's the
setting I've gone with.
My cell phone is an Ericsson T39m, still one of the best GSM phones
available if you don't need polyphonic ring tones, camera, and colour
LCD
(and, seriously, who does?). However, while the Newton will discover
the
T39, will get a list of services, and will report the T39's MAC
address, it
refuses to pair, regardless of whether I initiate the process from the
Newton or from the cell phone. Which is a bit of a bummer, since one
of the
main reasons for getting the Newton was that it was reported that it
supported Internet access both with WiFi and Bluetooth. The struggle
continues.
I get packages onto the Newton using NewTen and my homebrew cable (I
have
the SER-001 board installed). NewTen works, but seems to be very
sensitive
to how you start the connection. I have to press the "Open" button in
NewTen and the "Connect" button on the Newton withing about 1/2 second
of
each other, or the devices will fail to connect. Once that happens, I
have
to CTRL-Option-ESC kill NewTen (since it cannot be aborted any other
way)
and restart the process.
The other option would be to use Escale, especially since I now have
TCP/IP
and the Orinoco card working, and Escale supposedly supports package
uploading over TCP/IP. However, I've never managed to get Escale to do
anything except crash upon connecting. This is after rebuilding the
framework and app from source too. Oh well.
I downloaded and installed NewtSync, which does work over TCP/IP and
WiFi.
It did a marvellous job of transferring my Adress Book entries to the
Newton's "Names" application, but then presented me with an error
message
when I tried to sync the iCal entries:
"Please install iCal 1.5.1 or higher".
As it happens, I have iCal 1.5.2 installed. Oh well.
Finally, and I recommend that die-hard Newton fans stop reading here,
I've
struggled with the handwriting recognition in Newton OS 2.1. I've set
all
the parameters, tweaked the letter forms, including telling it which
ones I
use often, rarely, and never. I still only managed to get about 75%-85%
successful recognition (that's with letter recognition turned on:
turning it
off results in much less success). It may be that 85% correct
recognition
is a fantastic success rate and an amazing feat on something as small
as the
Newton MP 2100. In practical use, it sucks. I have no time nor any
interest in correcting 15%-25% of all the words I write. So, I
downloaded
and installed Grafitti 2.0 and it gives me pretty much 100% recognition
and
about 300% faster writing speed. AFAIK, Apple got it wrong, Palm got it
right.
OK summary: The Newton MP 2100 is seriously cool and capable, but it is
not
a "switch on and use out of the box" device by any means. You need to
be
able to devote 10-20 hours of time to setting it up and getting it
working.
Once you've overcome the initial bootstrapping problem it gets easier,
but
it helps if you're familiar with configuring computer systems and
networks
more or less from scratch. Building three different flavored Linux
systems
was good preparation for getting used to the Newton!
In closing: Many thanks to everyone who has written all this wonderful
software for the Newton, keeping it alive and well. I hope to join you
some
day. And many thanks to everyone on this list who helped out while I
was
tearing out my hair.
M.
--
This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries
Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 30 2004 - 16:30:01 PDT