I, Newton

I passed on the Newton when it first came around (I was a Palm fanatic. In fact, I ran a site called "hijacked" which was about being a Palm fanatic), although I still keep a trusty eMate around these days if I really want to type something. Now that I've found myself in a Macintosh way, I wish Apple would revisit the idea.

PDA's grew up though, and they stopped being simply satellite devices. Now they are phones and palmtop computers. The iPod, on the other hand, is a fantastic satellite device. It's cheap, it's simple and it can hold a lot of relevant data.

What I want is something in the middle. My Mini has wifi, and it has nothing to talk to. It's very lonely. Eventually I'd like to hook up the stereo system to iTunes, and don't want to be bothered running into the study just to change songs. I also don't want to have to get a laptop just to check some news and email.

What Apple could do is capitalize on Palm's mistake of not including wifi support on their low end products. I mean, for the price of some of the high end Palms with wifi, I could almost get another Mini. Give me something with a decent flash drive, decent screen, wifi, and and updated version of the Newton OS with a simple web browser interface. Call it the ... I dunno ... iPod Link. OK, that's probably not good, but I'm sure Apple has people for that kind of thing