I have owned a whole stack of pen computing devices including a Palm IIIxe, a Palm V, a Vadem Clio, a Casio e-105 and a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200.Nothing can compare to the Newton 2x00 series for productivity. It has the perfect sized screen -- 480x320, not shared by any other handheld device -- just small enough to fit in the palm of one hand, yet large enough to display lines and lines of data and notes.
Years before PocketPC, it shipped with a 100+ MHz CPU and megabytes of memory. It has two full-size PCMCIA slots squeezed in on the right hand side and will take a standard ethernet card, so I've got a 3Com 3c589 there and I use my newton for e-mail and for browsing the Web (HTML 3.2, Java support(!!), etc.) in real time.
I use Notion (a kind of RAD database) to keep track of my own personal libraries of books, DVDs, CDs, etc. as well as of my bank accounts, my finances and investing, and much more. The newton places calls, can send any piece of data it contains as an e-mail, a fax... I use the IR port to print directly to an HP printer and I can exchange data with Palm-owning friends.
On of my favorite ways to get data in and out and to share data among multiple people is to run the NPDS Web server on the device, which allows it to serve/search all kinds of data it contains from a Web interface with Internet Explorer, etc.
The Newton 2x00 combines the simplicity and integration of the PalmOS with the data-handling power of a full-size desktop computer. The only reason Newton is dead is that it was so far ahead of its time in the mid-'90s that no one knew what to do with one at the time. I only wish Apple would bring them back, because nothing else compares.
Submitted by: Aron Hsiao
Email: aussersterne@home.com
Location: Salt Lake City
Date Added: 2001-10-18
