Newton fans everywhere....
Okay so I have to admit that the Newton was pretty cool in its day. Even though it massacred my handwriting and had all those cutesy sounds that just drove me notes, but were so helpful in making sure that it understood what you wanted, the product was usable and useful to a particular set of early adopters. I remember about 5 years ago, I was working on the field trials for Tablet and one of the users who we had in the study (e.g. he was in the IT department and we wanted to make sure we had his cooperation), was a Newton fanatic. He’s probably reading this blog right now since it contains the magic words, but more likely he’s in France at this conference. What I find absolutely fascinating is that he was using the Newton primarily as a mobile web server. Who would have ever thought? But then again, I’m sure not everyone needs that…
So now we have Netwon’ians’(?) porting it to all kinds of other devices and it appears that one of the devices that is pretty interesting for an emulator is a Tablet PC. But in my book why would you go through the effort of doing that? You already have better handwriting recognition on the Tablet, you have access to almost any application imaginable, you have 2 different first class note taking experiences (Journal and One Note), and you could of course use Franklin Covey Planner etc. So what’s the appeal other than you can just do it?
Guess I’m growing old in that doing something for the sake of doing something, feels like such a waste of time these days….
