DeuceTech

Many of you may remember Apple’s foray into, and perhaps genesis of, the PDA that was known as the Newton. Still more probably have no recollection of it since it was one of the more notable products that got axed upon Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in the late 90s. There’s little doubt now that it was Jobs’ specific series of actions and brilliant, sometimes shrewd, leadership that led to the rapid salvation of the Apple ship and its continuing success, but at the time, the sudden loss of the Newton line was decried by many as a mistake and deemed a tragic loss in the then emerging world of the handheld computer/PDA. It was an incredible gadget with almost no peer save for the USRobotics Pilot which evolved into the PalmPilot. I won’t get into the differences between the two or technological superiorities of one over the other; this is very subjective and there is a ton of existing material to be had on the subject by searching online. There is also the subject of WindowsCE/Pocket PC that comes into play in this discussion since it also appeared at about the same time, but again, any curiosity about its early history and development is better satisfied by a bit of online research.

My main point here is simply to say that the death of the Newton years ago has always left what has been perceived as a hole in the PDA world that has left many people speculating as to what the PDA would be like today had it not been dropped from further development. The Palm Pilot and Windows CE were left to duke it out for many years and I would argue that, despite several advances on both platforms, neither has really ever progressed enough to make it stand out as the undisputed “must-have” handheld computer. Both platforms have had a lot of success and each has its staunch supporters, but overall, I think it is safe to say that the PDA has always been more of a “good idea” than an actual realization of a technology that everyone must have.

Personally, I have owned a couple of Palm devices, a couple of Pocket PCs, and more recently, several PDA telephones, including a Palm Treo, a Motorola Q, and a handful of different RIM BlackBerries. My experiences with the non-phone devices was that they worked well enough and had a lot of third party applications to do just about anything I ever wanted or needed. However, their lack of continuous data connectivity, bulkiness, poor battery life, and need for a stylus usually led to them being left on my desk rather than being with me whenever I had an occasion to use them. My experiences with the Treo and the Q were only marginally better in that the integration with continuous data connectivity and a telephone meant that I carried them with me more often, but they still suffered from most of the negative aspects of the earlier devices. In the end, they sat on my desk more than they should have, too. Out of all of them, the BlackBerry has turned out to be the one that I use most. All of the models I have owned share the same pluses: they are small, the batteries last for days, they are easy to use with one hand (no stylus), they are more stable than anything else I have used, and they run just about any application I can think of a need for. I always have my BlackBerry with me and it just works. Sure, some of the previously mentioned devices may have more memory or faster processors, but they are buggy, bulky, battery hogs that I just never felt comfortable on my belt like the BlackBerry does.

Back to the iPhone. While it is true that the iPod has had a few PDA functions built in since the beginning; games, notes, and contacts, these are functions that most users never even think about using. Now we have the iPhone that is poised to become the ultimate PDA. As it stands now, in its released first incarnation, it has a telephone, a web browser, a contact list, an email client, and it does photos, video, and music better than any device we’ve seen before, even its iPod predecessors.

There are some holes in its present functionality, document editing and limitations on cut-and-paste operations being two of the most notable, but this is after all, just iPhone 1.0. It is inevitable that the iPhone will be refined quickly and these shortcomings, as well as others that are already apparent to the early adopters, will all be addressed. While it is hard to say that this is really the new “Newton” it is the rebirth of the Newton concept as is evidenced by its leapfrogging of the competition. It is set to take an even greater lead it continues to be developed further and I think it is safe to say that it will never be axed as its spiritual predecessor was almost 10 years ago.