As I hold on for the long wait for my iPad 3G I was inspired to pull out my Apple Newton MessagePad 120 to baseline how far Apple has come since the Newton was first released in 1993. I was amazed at how unintuitive it was to use and thought about how our perceptions and expectations of a handheld user interface have been transformed by the iPhone. Putting my thoughts into a 1993 state of mind for a moment I imagined what it was like using this thing so long ago. One thing stuck out like a sore thumb to me: The MessagePad seemed utterly and completely impractical by even 1993 standards.
I believe that its failure was guaranteed no matter how powerful its designers made it. It wasn’t because of the applications or even its form factor, no its size and note taking, calendar, contacts and other apps including eMail capabilities were all fine for their day. It all came down to the user experience. Using the stylus with the on screen keyboard or worse, the built in handwriting recognition was unbearable. This highlights something that technology companies regularly forget and it’s why Steve Jobs killed the Newton when he took back control of Apple: The user experience matters. A lot.
The Palm Pilot with its graffiti was first, then the BlackBerry with its thumb friendly keyboard and then the iPhone with its quick responding multi-touch screen. At each stage the innovation wasn’t the devices capabilities, plenty of devices have done what they did before them. The innovation was the user experience that enabled the technology and made it accessible. The iPhone’s multi-touch interface made it a usable applications platform and everyday device, the app store just greased the wheels. Had Apple released the iPhone with a thumb keyboard or stylus it would have been just as successful (and boring) as every mobile device that had come before it.
So as I wait now for my iPad to arrive and I read all the articles for and against it I think most people focusing on battery life, flash support or built in capabilities are missing the point. The real innovation that will decide the iPad’s success will come down to only one thing, the iPads user experience and how successfully it bridges the gap between humans and technology.
Perhaps your experience has been jaded by using a MP120 with NOS 1.x. If so, then your experience with it might have been affected by the poorer handwriting recognition engines on that model.
I have only ever used the MP2100 and its a great machine. Using a stylus has never been a problem for me. I love using fountain pens and enjoy the aesthetic of handwriting.
For me, the user interface was always intuitive. Many of the screens in the Newton PIM applications required form filling. I see form filling hasn’t disappeared, it lives on in every IT platform. So what changes? The way you move from screen to screen?
I think that it was the screen size and the size of the control points on the screen that held the Newton back. It has been said that it was the perfect size for when you wanted to use it but the wrong size when you didn’t. There’s a lot of truth in that saying. The Newton’s resistive touchscreen allowed fingers to hit buttons and to control the interlace. Most of the screen elements were a bit small for this but some were big enough. The up/down arrows on the button bar were big enough.
Battery life with an MP2100 is in the order of several days, depending on the condition of your batteries. It use AA batteries so they are user interchangeable and replacements are readily available.
Today’s MMP2x00 machine supports Wifi, Bluetooth and ATA flash memory cards. With these technologies, using the Newton is quite a different experience.
Now my main beef with it is its lack of support for pdf, xlsx, docx and pptx file formats. But then I have a desktop for that kind of work.
Pick up an MP2x00, I recommend it.