> Being pretty new at some of this, could someone tell me about these "Apple
> Newtons?"
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Basically the Apple Newton is a handheld computer that is marketed as a
"Personal Data Assistant" (PDA), but it is easily reprogrammed to
become useful in various other information distribution environments.
Straight from http://newton.info.apple.com/newton/newton.html concerning the
NEWTON:
The Newton platform: A generation ahead of the competition
The Newton personal digital assistant (PDA) platform continues to gain
momentum in the business world. With the advent of Newton 2.0-the
second-generation platform from Apple Computer, Inc.-many companies and
individuals will have reason to make Newton their platform of choice.
This paper explains the advantages the Newton platform offers to
enterprise organizations and mobile professionals. With a significant
number of advancements and improvements in many areas-all the result of
extensive customer, developer, and licensee feedback-Newton 2.0 furthers
its lead in the areas critical to PDA users:
Organizational capabilities.
Newton 2.0 offers a strong set of organizational functions-built in.
These capabilities include:
The capturing of ideas and information.
New and improved recognizer for printed words. Enables Newton devices to
read unconnected, printed text. It recognizes each character,
letter-by-letter, which greatly improves accuracy of recognition. With
Newton 2.0, Apple has made improvements in cursive recognition as well.
External keyboard. The Newton Keyboard from Apple connects to Newton
PDAs, so users can type quickly on their PDA. It's especially helpful
when composing long memos or e-mail messages, or taking extensive meeting
notes.
Names. Enables users to easily record and recall names, addresses,
telephone numbers, and important contact and personal information. Users can
store information about hundreds of people, and they have the ability to
customize the type of information stored on a person-by-person basis.
For instance, users can specify that an entry has two e-mail
addresses, while another has, say, six phone numbers. Newton 2.0 also
allows users to group people, so correspondence can be addressed to an
entire group without the need to choose each person individually.
Dates. Enables users to keep a calendar, to-do lists, and reminders. Dates
comes complete with an alarm to keep users on schedule, and also a
repeating-task feature so users can schedule recurring events, such as
weekly meetings. With a variety of agenda views, users can view a day, week,
or month of appointments at a time. Dates comes with an integrated to-do
list that automatically rolls over to the next day's list.
-Organizational capabilities. Newton 2.0 offers users an expanded capability
to manage and organize information-with an intuitive user experience that
offers high user productivity, while requiring remarkably little
training, or none at all. Newton 2.0 offers users a host of new capabilities.
-Communication capabilities. Newton 2.0 gives users a way to connect to
their world through a wide variety of wired and wireless means. The
Newton platform was built from the ground up to offer communications
capabilities for mobile professionals, enabling them to access key
information and stay in touch, no matter where their day takes them.
Users can take advantage of Newton PDA devices to access data on networks,
to use information services, and to send and receive communications, e-mail
messages, and faxes.
See also the Case Studies at:
http://newton.info.apple.com/newton/aboutnewton/backgrounder/casestudies.html
for actual applications of the PDA.
Cheers-
R.B. Wilkins
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