You know, a MobilePro 900 like dock would be awesome too...being able to type on a keyboard made the MobilePro useful for a lot of writers that didn't need a full laptop and the thing really was mobile. Even more so than an ultraportable. The keyboard was 92% the size of a notebook keyboard.
Your ignorance is displeasing. 1) why the h*ll would you put a harddrive in an ultra-portable device. Flash memory is where even notebooks are heading. 2) Palms and other PDAs are not "hobby device", so why would the new Newton be so? Newtons were the original PDA, and were widely adopted across several industries, including medicine. 3) Newton's were big due to the technology at the time, and because they were more powerful. Palm's have only recent approached the power of the Newton. And obviously you can have a better display on a larger device, especially for professional applications (ever try reading much off of a Palm? it sucks.).
some more interesting things to ponder... why is Apple creating diverging devices when all this stuff could be on one device (e.g. phone, pda, music player)? Maybe they're doing it for profit, or maybe different people want different functionality. Maybe they will re-integrate these functions on a single device, e.g. if they ever open the iPhone up to development. just some random thoughts... discuss!
Disagree...there is a reason to use a drive in something like this, mass amounts of storage. I think a hybrid system is your best way to go for for something like this.. have 16 or 32gb of flash on there for the OS and cache for fastest access times, and have a hdd in there for data, programs ect. The device would have the proper power management to use the disk only if you needed to access it to keep batt life up. 3rd party apps are a given, there would be no point if it were not there. I think by this time the sdk would definatly be avail to developers ...If done correctly this could absolutely be a laptop replacement and fill in the spot where the old 12 inch ibook was.
Could you check the link: we don't have access to your iBook's hard disk!
This is the first image I tried to include in a post. It worked for me in preview, but I obviously did something wrong. How do I include an image that is on my desktop, and can it be a PNG image?
This is why the iPhone and iPod touch is limited and Apple doesn't want you to put your own 3rd party apps on it. They have a PDA they want to push, and if some developer is writing apps that will do everything that this PDA offers it will equal low PDA sells. Just my .02.
It's a very interesting idea, for sure. And if there really is a tablet coming, I bet that exact thought has been tossed back and forth in meetings at Apple.
At the risk of sounding like a shill for someone else's writing, though, I think one of the most insightful things I read along the lines of the "Where is the iPhone SDK?" came from John Siracusa on Ars Technica. The article can be found here:
He reminds us that even though this is OS X, Apple is basically in the process of inventing an entirely new interface paradigm. They're still trying to decide a lot in the details about what they think constitute the new rules for interface design.
So even if they were planning to throw the platform wide open to developers with the intro of a tablet, there would still be a ton of work to do before an SDK would land in the hands of you and me.
i don't get this. the iphone already does this and more, what would a larger form factor give you other than something harder to transport?
Oh I can think of some markets for this. For one thing, it is much lighter, durable, and cheaper than a laptop, so this would make a perfect item for students in elementary and high school. It would also be the ideal thing to take with you to bed for reading e-books and surfing the web. I find using my hot, heavy laptop in bed a nuisance. And when you're traveling and want to jot down notes, but find the iPhone's screen too small, and the laptop too inconvenient to pull out for a quick note, then I think this device would be perfect. I think the only barrier to this kind of gadget so far has been price. When tthat comes down, I expect to see lots of road warriers getting something like this.
WOW! Amazing. Make it a full Mac OS X computer on your hand and that is what we have been waiting for years for all students, lecturers and researchers at our University. With full Keynote and PowerPoint NATIVE file support. The ultimate handhelp presentation remote. We need thousands.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hobbes
Well, if it's real it won't be Mac OS X. It will be OS X Mobile.
And I don't doubt that iWork will be coming one day for OS X Mobile, but it's going to take time.
Why do you think your university could use thousands of these? Why not just use a laptop for a presentation, or to take notes?
The new Intel Silverthorne chips allows the full Mac OS X inside. On the other hand, laptops are too heavy, bulky and large. We need a small handhelp full computer, and now the technology to make it has arrived.
Disagree...there is a reason to use a drive in something like this, mass amounts of storage.
Yeah, that is true today, but hard drives are going the way of the dodo, and happily so. Flash memory may be tiny now in comparison, but expect this to double every year, and in 5 years it wlil be where hard drives are today, but consuming far less power and putting out a lot less heat. So I think this argument is like the one people were having back when Apple was the first to stop installing 3.5" floppy drives. people simply could not imagine a world without them, but Apple wisely weened us off it them, and today no one misses them.
Yeah, that is true today, but hard drives are going the way of the dodo, and happily so. Flash memory may be tiny now in comparison, but expect this to double every year, and in 5 years it wlil be where hard drives are today, but consuming far less power and putting out a lot less heat. So I think this argument is like the one people were having back when Apple was the first to stop installing 3.5" floppy drives. people simply could not imagine a world without them, but Apple wisely weened us off it them, and today no one misses them.
There's moving on to the next thing, and there's jumping the gun. Do you do realize that five years is about the max reasonably expected life span of portable electronics? Hard drives aren't static, they too are still advancing fairly quickly, so you might find 128GB flash as a counterpart to a 1TB+ 1.8" drive. 1.8" hard drives don't consume that much power or generate that much heat.
you might be right, but why would i want a phone .and. a PDA? that would make as much sense as an iPod, iPhone and PDA on my mega utility belt. (not going to happen).
hey, at least it's better than palm's dumb folio idea.
It has the hardware and OS components of a PDA, but the included iTouch software doesn't do a few things that's critical to a PDA, such as take, store, sync and show notes, have a todo list, and there's this inability to enter contacts (or is it calendar entries?, it does one but not the other). It is very nice and it has incredible potential, but it's not quite there yet either.
I concede that point. It does need a few more things to truly be a fully functional PDA and I don't think the iPod Touch itself would ever become a high powered PDA without Apple opening the doors to third party software developers, but I do think its basic functionality is more PDAish than anything else. Gotta love the technology gray area.
This is the first image I tried to include in a post. It worked for me in preview, but I obviously did something wrong. How do I include an image that is on my desktop, and can it be a PNG image?
I concede that point. It does need a few more things to truly be a fully functional PDA and I don't think the iPod Touch itself would ever become a high powered PDA without Apple opening the doors to third party software developers, but I do think its basic functionality is more PDAish than anything else. Gotta love the technology gray area.
In most respects I do agree.
I really don't think it would take much to get to something I can use as a PDA, for me, it looks like's 99% there, but the last pieces of the puzzle are pretty limiting.
Sorry about the link but I wasn't sure how to get the image inline.
You did it right. The problem is some/most forum sites will block dynamic urls from being an image in the IMG tag and just show them as links. Allowing php image links is some kind of vulnerability or something.
It is kinda funny that it is a picture of a chick.
I think I figured it out. The image is small when I previewed the post so hopefully it will be bigger when I actually post. I did not see the hot chick that was mentioned so I reset Safari and deleted all images of the matrix then clicked my link and saw her. I believe the hot chick is Alyson Hannigan.
I used Pages to create this chart and then I did a shift-command-4 to select what I wanted to capture. I opened it in Preview and saved it as a JPEG image because imagevenue does not host PNG images.
Ok the iPhone has a 3.5" screen at 480x320, 163 dpi. If we go for a 7" screen, that is literally doubling the size of the iPhone, we get a resolution of 960x640.
Late model Newton's used a 6" screen, but Newton II would be more screen on the body then a MessagePad 2100 so a similar sized device overall.
I think that's too low a resolution as I consider 1024x768 to be pretty much the bottom floor if Newton II is to be usable. However I don't think we're limited to 163 dpi with resolution independence so what if we take a bold step forward… 247 dpi.
( ... )
I did a little mocking up to see how useful the screen would really be, assuming an iPhone-style 163 dpi screen at 1.5x the physical size (the 720x480 resolution given in the original post). Viewing the same page from a pdf ebook on an iPhone vs. an iSlate/Son of Newton device yields something like this:
So even at the same pixel density as the iPhone, the bigger screen clearly yields a huge benefit.
Comments
This is what you're looking for.
Mobile OSX plus mobile chips smaller than a penny but more powerful than Core solos. Amazing
Oh and did I mention that WiMAX will be supported.
Nice SOC. Yeah I saw those and then forgot all about them since I didn't see right away why I'd want them.
I did not see a product matrix so I made one.
[IMG]http://ibook-g4.local/~trroberts/images/Newton_Matrix.png
Could you check the link: we don't have access to your iBook's hard disk!
Your ignorance is displeasing. 1) why the h*ll would you put a harddrive in an ultra-portable device. Flash memory is where even notebooks are heading. 2) Palms and other PDAs are not "hobby device", so why would the new Newton be so? Newtons were the original PDA, and were widely adopted across several industries, including medicine. 3) Newton's were big due to the technology at the time, and because they were more powerful. Palm's have only recent approached the power of the Newton. And obviously you can have a better display on a larger device, especially for professional applications (ever try reading much off of a Palm? it sucks.).
some more interesting things to ponder... why is Apple creating diverging devices when all this stuff could be on one device (e.g. phone, pda, music player)? Maybe they're doing it for profit, or maybe different people want different functionality. Maybe they will re-integrate these functions on a single device, e.g. if they ever open the iPhone up to development. just some random thoughts... discuss!
Disagree...there is a reason to use a drive in something like this, mass amounts of storage. I think a hybrid system is your best way to go for for something like this.. have 16 or 32gb of flash on there for the OS and cache for fastest access times, and have a hdd in there for data, programs ect. The device would have the proper power management to use the disk only if you needed to access it to keep batt life up. 3rd party apps are a given, there would be no point if it were not there. I think by this time the sdk would definatly be avail to developers ...If done correctly this could absolutely be a laptop replacement and fill in the spot where the old 12 inch ibook was.
Could you check the link: we don't have access to your iBook's hard disk!
This is the first image I tried to include in a post. It worked for me in preview, but I obviously did something wrong. How do I include an image that is on my desktop, and can it be a PNG image?
This is why the iPhone and iPod touch is limited and Apple doesn't want you to put your own 3rd party apps on it. They have a PDA they want to push, and if some developer is writing apps that will do everything that this PDA offers it will equal low PDA sells. Just my .02.
It's a very interesting idea, for sure. And if there really is a tablet coming, I bet that exact thought has been tossed back and forth in meetings at Apple.
At the risk of sounding like a shill for someone else's writing, though, I think one of the most insightful things I read along the lines of the "Where is the iPhone SDK?" came from John Siracusa on Ars Technica. The article can be found here:
The Frontier
He reminds us that even though this is OS X, Apple is basically in the process of inventing an entirely new interface paradigm. They're still trying to decide a lot in the details about what they think constitute the new rules for interface design.
So even if they were planning to throw the platform wide open to developers with the intro of a tablet, there would still be a ton of work to do before an SDK would land in the hands of you and me.
i don't get this. the iphone already does this and more, what would a larger form factor give you other than something harder to transport?
Oh I can think of some markets for this. For one thing, it is much lighter, durable, and cheaper than a laptop, so this would make a perfect item for students in elementary and high school. It would also be the ideal thing to take with you to bed for reading e-books and surfing the web. I find using my hot, heavy laptop in bed a nuisance. And when you're traveling and want to jot down notes, but find the iPhone's screen too small, and the laptop too inconvenient to pull out for a quick note, then I think this device would be perfect. I think the only barrier to this kind of gadget so far has been price. When tthat comes down, I expect to see lots of road warriers getting something like this.
WOW! Amazing. Make it a full Mac OS X computer on your hand and that is what we have been waiting for years for all students, lecturers and researchers at our University. With full Keynote and PowerPoint NATIVE file support. The ultimate handhelp presentation remote. We need thousands.
Well, if it's real it won't be Mac OS X. It will be OS X Mobile.
And I don't doubt that iWork will be coming one day for OS X Mobile, but it's going to take time.
Why do you think your university could use thousands of these? Why not just use a laptop for a presentation, or to take notes?
The new Intel Silverthorne chips allows the full Mac OS X inside. On the other hand, laptops are too heavy, bulky and large. We need a small handhelp full computer, and now the technology to make it has arrived.
Disagree...there is a reason to use a drive in something like this, mass amounts of storage.
Yeah, that is true today, but hard drives are going the way of the dodo, and happily so. Flash memory may be tiny now in comparison, but expect this to double every year, and in 5 years it wlil be where hard drives are today, but consuming far less power and putting out a lot less heat. So I think this argument is like the one people were having back when Apple was the first to stop installing 3.5" floppy drives. people simply could not imagine a world without them, but Apple wisely weened us off it them, and today no one misses them.
Yeah, that is true today, but hard drives are going the way of the dodo, and happily so. Flash memory may be tiny now in comparison, but expect this to double every year, and in 5 years it wlil be where hard drives are today, but consuming far less power and putting out a lot less heat. So I think this argument is like the one people were having back when Apple was the first to stop installing 3.5" floppy drives. people simply could not imagine a world without them, but Apple wisely weened us off it them, and today no one misses them.
There's moving on to the next thing, and there's jumping the gun. Do you do realize that five years is about the max reasonably expected life span of portable electronics? Hard drives aren't static, they too are still advancing fairly quickly, so you might find 128GB flash as a counterpart to a 1TB+ 1.8" drive. 1.8" hard drives don't consume that much power or generate that much heat.
you might be right, but why would i want a phone .and. a PDA? that would make as much sense as an iPod, iPhone and PDA on my mega utility belt. (not going to happen).
hey, at least it's better than palm's dumb folio idea.
It has the hardware and OS components of a PDA, but the included iTouch software doesn't do a few things that's critical to a PDA, such as take, store, sync and show notes, have a todo list, and there's this inability to enter contacts (or is it calendar entries?, it does one but not the other). It is very nice and it has incredible potential, but it's not quite there yet either.
I concede that point. It does need a few more things to truly be a fully functional PDA and I don't think the iPod Touch itself would ever become a high powered PDA without Apple opening the doors to third party software developers, but I do think its basic functionality is more PDAish than anything else. Gotta love the technology gray area.
This is the first image I tried to include in a post. It worked for me in preview, but I obviously did something wrong. How do I include an image that is on my desktop, and can it be a PNG image?
Load onto one of the photo sharing sites first...
I concede that point. It does need a few more things to truly be a fully functional PDA and I don't think the iPod Touch itself would ever become a high powered PDA without Apple opening the doors to third party software developers, but I do think its basic functionality is more PDAish than anything else. Gotta love the technology gray area.
In most respects I do agree.
I really don't think it would take much to get to something I can use as a PDA, for me, it looks like's 99% there, but the last pieces of the puzzle are pretty limiting.
I did not see a product matrix so I made one.
Sorry about the link but I wasn't sure how to get the image inline.
buddy, now it shows hot chick!
I did not see a product matrix so I made one.
Sorry about the link but I wasn't sure how to get the image inline.
You did it right. The problem is some/most forum sites will block dynamic urls from being an image in the IMG tag and just show them as links. Allowing php image links is some kind of vulnerability or something.
It is kinda funny that it is a picture of a chick.
I used Pages to create this chart and then I did a shift-command-4 to select what I wanted to capture. I opened it in Preview and saved it as a JPEG image because imagevenue does not host PNG images.
( ... )
Screen Resolution
Ok the iPhone has a 3.5" screen at 480x320, 163 dpi. If we go for a 7" screen, that is literally doubling the size of the iPhone, we get a resolution of 960x640.
Late model Newton's used a 6" screen, but Newton II would be more screen on the body then a MessagePad 2100 so a similar sized device overall.
I think that's too low a resolution as I consider 1024x768 to be pretty much the bottom floor if Newton II is to be usable. However I don't think we're limited to 163 dpi with resolution independence so what if we take a bold step forward… 247 dpi.
( ... )
I did a little mocking up to see how useful the screen would really be, assuming an iPhone-style 163 dpi screen at 1.5x the physical size (the 720x480 resolution given in the original post). Viewing the same page from a pdf ebook on an iPhone vs. an iSlate/Son of Newton device yields something like this:
So even at the same pixel density as the iPhone, the bigger screen clearly yields a huge benefit.
See the rest of the post here:
http://wowio.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/islate-vs-iphone-a-clear-reading-advantage/
........
Gerry Manacsa
wowio.wordpress.com