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Friday, March 10, 2006

My Origami Is A Newton

Awesome post on TUAW comparing Microsoft's UMPC ("Origami") to Apple's (now deprecated) Newton.




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4 comments:

Thomas said...

I know it's tongue-in-cheek, but I've owned a Newton. It was kind of a bad experience.

Josh said...

Newton owners seem to either love or hate it, kinda like a Martin or Fanatic approach.

When I ran a Palm Pilot fansite, I got a couple emails from Newton fan of varying degrees of scary ... and my brother has gotten a ton of mileage and usage from his.

Personally, I liked my eMate until it couldn't communicate with modern computers anymore.

Thomas said...

I think my problem was approaching it after a few years of working with PalmOS, then PocketPC. Both of which, just by default of progress, had their act more together.

The article does, on topic, raise an important point: both devices are HUGE by practical terms. They face a real uphill battle between PDA's and fully-fledged laptops or tablets. I think they had a better balance between battery life, CPU power, and portability with the HandheldPC standard, but that seems to be pretty much dead now.

Josh said...

Yeah, I don't know if the evolution of handheld device to pocket computer has been entirely great.

The original Pilot did what it needed to, and it did it quite well. As we've tacked on more power and hardware, I'm not sure how much ... as the article jokingly points out ... we've really gained.

The Tablet PC? I'd take a laptop over it any day of the week, and still will. I'm glad they're adding a keyboard ... but I'd rather someone add a touchscreen to my laptop and call it a day.

Notes, the web, games and music ... I like having those in an ultralight format I can carry anywhere.

For real computing? I'll take a real computer.