Well, here we are. Apple have unveiled their tablet computer - the iPad. So what of it? What kind of mis-informed ideas have entered my mind? Some observations I have jotted down are here.

Oh - click the pictures to see larger versions.

I am an Apple Newton fan. I own a Newton 2000, and used it a lot before and after Apple killed it off. Since Mac OSX, it has been quite difficult to get the Newton to work with Macs, and while there have been some heroric attempts to get syncing to work, I have never found them to be truly satisfactory.

And, just to add injury to insult, January 2010 marks the time when the Newton’s clock gives up the ghost. Again, heroic efforts are in force to fix the problem, but you have to get the hack (and it is a hack since Apple locked the door and kept the key) from your desktop to the Newton. The problem is the way in which the Newton handles time. It is a kind of millennium bug where time ceases to make sense to the machine’s clock.

So here we are in January 2010, with Newtons giving up the ghost and what happens? Apple introduces something that looks like a little like a Newton Extreme. They call it an iPad, but it’s apparent functionality certainly nods back to the Newton 2000 and its sibling, the eMate. You could argue that the eMate signalled the device that we call the NetBook today. It shared much with the Newton 2000, but came as a clamshell device. The iPAd is clearly Apple’s take on the netbook, and the pricing suggests that this is the market they are aiming at. In fact, they are aiming at a couple of markets. All those flickery ebook readers out there have just received their wakeup call.

There is a big crossover between the Newton and iPad in terms of functionality. The Newton may have had a monochrome display and debatable handwriting recognition, but it did much that the iPad does today.

Browsing

The Newton had a web browser. Sure, to connect to the internet you needed an external modem, or a network card, or use the infrared port (if you could find an infrared access point) but you could get on the web and look at web sites. More recently, it has become possible to hook a Newton 2000 into a wireless network and browse sites that way too. Today, you would not get much joy on the so called “Web 2.0” sites, and YouTube would just not work, but in 1996, the built in browser on the Newton was a fairly capable bit of software. Today, the iPad today includes a version of Safari, Apple’s default browser for Macs, the iPod Touch and the iPhone. It will happily handle a lot of online content, but obviously plug-ins (such as Flash) will not work. Steve Jobs showed the New York Times’ front page on his presentation, and the missing plug-in icon was evident. So the iPad won’t handle any Flash that comes its way.

Email

Yes - the Newton did email. I sent a few messages form it, but you have to remember that at the time it was not a wireless device in the way that the iPad is. I was cabled to a 56K modem for that experiment. What the Newton did do was store up emails and send them when you were connected. Doubtless the iPad will do that too, but with it having WiFi and optional 3G hardware, sending emails is more likely to be instant.

Diary

The Newton was a PDA - Personal Digital Assistant. It had a diary with alarms, and it was able to sync with your Mac/PC using a serial cable and Apple’s software. The iPad also has a diary which syncs with your desktop machine’s diary. If it is anything like the iPhone in terms of functionality, it will sync instantly, and not need to be connected to iTunes to perform a sync.

Office Software

The Newton has Newtworks built in - it was a word processor and a spreadsheet application. This was pretty good stuff  -you would write (remember, the Newton did handwriting recognition) or type (using the software keyboard or a proper plug in keyboard) large documents and send them to your Mac or PC. The documents were essentially saved as AppleWorks files on the Mac. The iPad will let you buy (for a small fee) Pages, Numbers and Keynote. For the iPad, these are extra to the package, but when you consider what comes pre-installed on the iPad, this is pretty good. Unlike the Newton, the iPad is clearly aimed more at consumers - so the software installed is more geared towards leisure use. However, put a copy of PAges and Numbers on it, and you have a portable office suite. The iPad has a shared folder, so your Pages documents can be moved from the iPad to your desktop machine, and mack again. No information on how a Pages document in the iPad will be saved to word format for those people using Windows though. Maybe the PAges app has a Save As... option.

So, as you can see, Apple have put together a fairly good Newton replacement. It’s big, will probably need more than a pocket to fit in, but it will do a lot more than the Newton used to. There is going to be a lot more software for the iPad than there ever was for the Newton, and a lot of that will be games. But the screen size invites drawing programs, photo manipulation and a lot of other stuff that the Newton could never do.