’90s Newton Beats New Windows UMPC

28 Jul, 2006 at 12:51pm ET Article published in Tech

In the market for an Ultra Mobile PC? Might want to try eBay.

We pitted the Apple Newton Messagepad against the latest Samsung Q1 ultra-mobile PC (Origami project), and — despite being a decade old — the Newton won. Find out why by checking out the blow-by-blow account here.

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Apple launched the Newton over ten years ago, but it failed to capture the public’s imagination and was ultimately discontinued. Many critics held the view that the Newton failed, not because it was a badly designed product, but because it was simply ahead of its time — a market for ultra-mobile computers simply didn’t exist back then.

A decade on and it seems we’ve learnt little about mobile computer design. Apple’s Newton trumped Samsung’s offering with two knockout punches in our head-to-head battle. We feel the title is well earned, what do you think?

As one might imagine, there are a large number of comments in the Talkback section of the article.

Source: c|net

Comments

28 Jul 2006 ~ 1:30pm GHoosdum That was rather silly...
28 Jul 2006 ~ 5:30pm Jengo you know, come to think of it, that is pretty stupid... the iQ is supposed to be a beat'em all portable computer, not a beat'em all portable computer with 2 and a half hours of battery life, how dumb. And it really is sad that the newton, almost 10 years old gets better battery life.

its kind of like my stupid PSP, i really like my psp dont get me wrong, but whenever i finally get into a game and am really enjoying myself... guess what... the battery is always dying... that never happens on my DS
29 Jul 2006 ~ 1:52pm drasnor Actually, Newtons really were hardcore. Our school used to have Newton eMate 300's (a clamshell design with keyboard and stylus-screen, PCMCIA slots, full I/O for the times, etc.) I keep looking for a broken one to mod.

-drasnor
30 Jul 2006 ~ 5:38pm TheSmJ I read the article, and the Samsung tablet looks a whole lot better to me. The newton only has a greyscale screen (and only 256 shades of grey), and is missing a bunch of features that modern computers need.

Sure, the battery life of the Samsung is stupidly low, but that aside it runs circles around the Newton. If they fix that it would win hands down.
30 Jul 2006 ~ 8:15pm Thrax Go go gadget shock journalism to drive hits and ramp up the volume of comments.
30 Jul 2006 ~ 8:47pm profdlp

Thrax wrote:

Go go gadget shock journalism to drive hits and ramp up the volume of comments.

Thank you for adding yours.
30 Jul 2006 ~ 9:28pm Thrax

profdlp wrote:

Thank you for adding yours.

In regards to the C|Net article, not SM's posting thereof. It has some interesting points, particularly in regards to battery life and mission-oriented operating system design, but it's pretty hokey otherwise.