Apple Newton vs. Apple iPhone

An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK has written a head-to-head piece entitled Apple Newton vs Apple iPhone. Despite the Newton being released some 10 years ago, and despite the iPhone being a phone, not a tablet, the site's editors believe the Newton is the more innovative of the two Apple products. The two devices were tied over four rounds, but in the 'Special Powers' element, where the iPhone was praised for its iPod capability, the Newton countered with its ability to play MP3s, connect to iTunes and 'its ability to work as a phone' because 'Blam! Not even the iPhone can do that.'"

10 Years? Try 16 Years!

[Uire]

The original Newton - the MessagePad - was released in 1993. Heck, The Steve *cancelled* Newton more than 10 years ago. Really.

Re:ok

[drdrgivemethenews]

I have an iphone (3Gs) and hate it. Terrible phone. Nice toy though. Even though I hate the keyboard, I have to say that the large screen was the innovation that sold me: I can actually read a slashdot story on this device. But so many things are broken, it's just too much. Some of it is ATT, yes.

I'm going to Verizon Real Soon Now, for real phone service, and getting a real GPS, so my locator service will actually work when I need it, not just 1/3 of the time. Those are the two things I really wanted out of a phone, and I'm not getting either of them now.

Re:10 Years? Try 16 Years!

[julesh]

The original Newton - the MessagePad - was released in 1993. Heck, The Steve *cancelled* Newton more than 10 years ago. Really.

That's the submitter's error. Article says the Newton was 10 years old last time they did such a comparison, against an early windows mobile device.

Re:Have to agree, from experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

>

Then, in 2000, I was still using it. But I accidentally left it on a conference room table after a meeting and it disappeared. It actually got STOLEN. In the 21st century.

It apparently had an off-by-one bug.

Re:ok

[Bert64]

It does support multitasking, it just doesn't support multitasking with third party apps through the official app store. The apple apps can multitask, as can third party apps on jailbroken phones.

Re:ok

[Darkness404]

Hm, odd because in browser stats Apple has -nearly half- of browser marketshare for smartphones (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/01/iphone-continues-to-slam-mobile-web-competition.ars) and the other thing is you have to realize the scale here. Apple has one phone (well, it had 2 previous phones but they are discontinued), is on one network for many countries, and was released in 2007. Nokia has many phones, Symbian has shipped since 2003 and you can get them on just about any network. Samsung again, has lots of Windows Mobile phones, on many networks and many of them were before 2007. RIM has a multitude of phones, on just about every network, and was made, way before 2007. So I'd say the iPhone was a best seller, yeah, Nokia may have a larger marketshare, but not many of those phones are in use. If you have a product that only came out in 2007, and have 50% of the smartphone browser market in Jan. of 2009, I'd say that was pretty impressive for only having 2 phones, one discontinued after the other came out and being on 1 network per country and not even selling phones in some countries.

That's the point - there's nothing special about the Iphone, apart from being one in a long line of high end phones from various companies.

There are few other phones of this decade that have so revolutionized the marketplace. Ok, before the iPhone how many other captive touchscreen phones were there? How many phones with good browsers? With a large amount of apps? With a decent UI? The success of the iPhone kicked Android development into high gear, that in turn influenced major phones on every large network save for AT&T, the success of the iPhone also gave rise to millions of clone devices, or similar devices. About the only phone that I can think of with the same impact was the Motorola Razr (and perhaps that old monochrome Nokia phone with Snake on it and those exchangeable faceplates, but I think that came out before 2000)

But for some reason, even years later, all we hear is Iphone Iphone Iphone, and never about any of the interesting developments from major players like Nokia.

Um, perhaps because there hasn't been -any- interesting developments from Nokia? I mean, aside from the N900, most of Nokia's phones have been relatively uninspired. The other major players have been uninspiring, yeah, the BlackBerry is great if you want E-mail, but it relies on the aging BlackberryOS, still lacks polish, and their last major redesign (Storm) was a failure (yeah, Storm 2 is better, but the original Storm sucked), Windows Mobile is still crap. And Android is moving ahead but still lacks the polish/apps/support of some of the other phones.

If you want a browser, get the iPhone. If you want a phone that has promise, get Android. If you need something super-reliable get a BlackBerry. If you for some odd reason need an obscure Windows Mobile app get Windows Mobile.

Re:ok

[fbjon]

You do realise that the marketshare you linked to is for the US only? The situation looks different when considering the world smartphone market. Just sayin...

Re:Why did it fail?

[R3d M3rcury]

Well there were a few reasons:

• Price. The original Newton was priced at $700. They never really came down that much, making them fairly expensive. You got the general argument, "Why should I spend $700 for a Newton when I can spend $5 for a datebook?"
• Size. The MessagePad was a fairly large device. It was a little too big to fit in your pocket.
• Handwriting Recognition. The impressive part of the Newton was that you would write and it would "read" your handwriting. One problem was that the Newton had to be "trained" to learn your handwriting, which Apple didn't really emphasize. So people ended up with the expectation that they would pull it out of the box and start writing and be off and running. When it didn't work well, people returned it. Doonesbury's famous cartoon [doonesbury.com] let the world know that the product didn't work and it carried the stigma for years--even after the handwriting recognition improved.

Re:ok

[MikeBabcock]

I'm no iPhone fan, but now you're claiming Linux isn't a multitasking OS. Linux also (optionally) kills apps just because of memory needs, the infamous OOM killer.

Android also kills background apps because of memory pressure, and does a miserable job of it sometimes but that's fixable. Its also Linux.