Re: [NTLK] NewtPhone

I remember there being another one made *FOR* the MP2x00.
I only saw the thing twice. It was in the Mitre building in Reston Virginia (for those aware of the area, it was off of Sunset Hills Road near the Kaiser Permanente facility)
About a year before the Newt's demise, I struck a deal with Mitre to rent several MP2000's from my company for testing wireless and mobile office technology. They contracted (Siemens again, if I remember correctly) a company to manufacture a cradle for the Newt that would act as a docking station. This utilitarian, battleship grey, docking station had a place to insert the Newt...you put it in upside down and the serial port and power plugged into the docking station by sliding down onto waiting plugs. This initiated a program on the Newt which would announce the Newt's location to a main server. The server would then activate that station for use depending on the settings in your Newt. It would enable the network port (for your laptop or whatever) and assign that station with your phone number and mailbox (kinda like a "follow-me" system). You dialed using the Newt's display and used the Newt as a speaker phone or used the docking station's built-in
 handset. It also had an LCD display that would tell the status of that station...active, pending, reserved...
The demo I observed also had people walking around with their Newts using a wireless card that was not WiFi (again, memory a little fuzzy here). The card was specially designed for multi-path signals. Each Newt had a program that attached to the address book, so that if you tapped a person in your address book, and that person was a Mitre employee known to have  Newt, you had an action slip that said "Find". When selected, a dialog box would popup with the room number of where that person is or was last identified. That dialog box had 3 buttons, Show, which showed a floor-plan and would show you how to get to that room from where you were (destination location technology), the second button said Contact, which would attempt to create a peer to peer IM session and the third button said close.
I only saw about a half a dozen of these docking stations (which were fully networked as well) and only saw the demo once. They would not allow me to install the application on my own Newt though, I had to use one of their Newts that they were renting from us...which they thouroughly wiped when they returned the Newts to us....the day after Jobs announced the demise of the Newton! In talking to the Mitre person who I was working with, he said that he got this idea from when he was in the Navy and the US Navy was testing out Newtons in their Nuclear submarines  for ship board location communications...but they had problems with multipath wireless signals...that project was scrapped because of the metal on the submarine would cause erratic signals that they couldn't compensate for!
I did dumpster dive for almost a week after they returned the Newtons to us, but never found one of those docking stations...and my contact left the area soon after the Newts were returned and never returned my calls either! Somehow I think he partially blamed my company for the Newts demise...perhaps he thought that we knew more than we were letting on or something...but no...that announcement caught everyone by surprise!
Anyway...there are about 6 of those things that I know of, floating out there somewhere...perhaps in a dark corner of some store room somewhere.
I do know that they were spending hundred of thousands of dollars on this project (several tens of thousands were spent with my company alone) and that discussions of purchasing 2-3 hundred thousand Newts was not out of the question (which Apple wanted no part of that conversation)!
Oh well....
Ed
web/gadget guru
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--- On Mon, 6/22/09, Sonny Hung <sonnyhung@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Sonny Hung <sonnyhung@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [NTLK] NewtPhone
To: newtontalk@newtontalk.net
Date: Monday, June 22, 2009, 9:39 AM

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:36 AM, jg <dotline7@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which Newton was used with Siemens NewtPhone?

The NotePhone by Siemens was based on the OMP they had DE; German NOS on
them.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonnyhung/sets/72057594059547504/

There was a second version which was based on the MP2000
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sonnyhung/sets/72057594061321300/

Someone actually mentioned to me they either had one of these or a
non-functional unit which they sold to a collector.
I'm not sure about the validity of their statement - take it for what it is
just a statement.

--
God bless,
Sonny Hung
the Hung Family
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