[NTLK] The Incredible Shrinking Newt

[Igor Bertolucci]

Jeff,

I think that is a great idea to have a distribution that can be installed on various devices. As I was playing around with the Onyx Nova Pro I was thinking the hardware is great and the actual writing experience is awesome (the pen lines and e paper screen quality) but the software sucks. I was starting to think: “there are all these crowd-funded devices out there, couldn’t the Newton community come up with an e-ink device like the Nova (I would prefer a 6” version) but with Einstein installed as the OS without the ROM (so that it can be freely distributed). Then all we would need to do is download the ROM from our original Newton and we would all be good to go.”

But your idea of jailing-breaking any Android device and installing an Einstein Distro having direct access to the hardware is a much better and realistic way to go. Anybody could choose whatever device they prefer (larger/smaller screen, etc.) and have Newton in it. It would be a Newton Revolution! I’m in! Let’s do it!

Cheers,
Igor

> On Apr 11, 2019, at 13:09, Jeff Sheldon <jeffsheldon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm a big proponent of e-ink as well as it maintains the general feel of
> the Newton experience and substantially cuts down on power draw.  The Boox
> device made me immediately think of the Newton, but Android running on it
> feels silly.  The hardware hurdles of marrying the technologies is
> substantial.  It took me about 15 years to come to the conclusion that
> Einstein is the only real answer to move forward with and to accept that
> the Newton hardware will see a slow decline despite best (and appropriate)
> efforts to keep it going.
> 
> Despite my personal distaste for Android, I think the following model is
> the 100% absolute correct way to proceed: That we need an Einstein
> DISTRIBUTION which can adapt to many different tablet and phone hardware
> platforms.
> 
> t would be interesting to take a similar approach that others have
> (Ubports, postmarketOs, etc.) to containerize Android for oddball hardware
> support, run a Linux kernel on with minimal GNU installation, and position
> Einstein as the front-facing app.  Cyanogenmod has traditionally been the
> go-to instead of straight Android in these sorts of situations, but now
> LineageOS has picked up what was left of the remains following operational
> people problems.  It's great that we can install Einstein on various
> operating systems, but it's not great that we don't have it as a
> distributable operating environment that can run on cheap, dedicated,
> hardware.  As long as this problem exists, we'll keep seeing struggles and
> energy put into facets of the Newton that are residual symptoms of this
> missing answer.  In other words, there shouldn't be any reason why we can't
> buy a Boox product, jailbreak it, and have a downloadable firmware
> replacement in order to enjoy e-ink and good battery life.  This style of
> approach is being done every day with such devices in other communities.
> 
> In the meantime, maybe this is a good time for me to fish out the dusty
> Galaxy Tab 4 a friend gave me. :-)
> 
> -Jeff
>