Apple Newton vs. Apple iPhone 203
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.'"
Newton wins? (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't the iPhone get points in this comparison for not being the equivalent of carrying a Dell laptop's giant powerbrick around in your pocket?
I know this article was written all in fun, but - you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that'd want to carry a Newton around instead of an iPhone. Or a Newton instead of even a Windows Mobile device.
Re:ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ok (Score:3, Insightful)
Which isn't a problem. What I don't like is the part where they turn around and proclaim themselves as innovators.
Sometimes packaging is the innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Um what? If the iPhone was nothing new, when it was released and even now, you wouldn't have competitors scrambling to catch up. If there was no innovation, there wouldn't be anything to catch up to.
Re:ok (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft has been doing the same for years now. Anyone that believes corporate propaganda should go out and get some fresh air.
Newton Users Can Run Their Choice of Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing they left out in the app comparison is that Newton users can add in any apps they wanted. They're not limited to the ones approved by Apple in the gated community known as the App Store.
Re:ok (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Daily Apple Slashvertisement again. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Daily Apple Slashvertisement again. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, I've been seeing this exact same comment on a lot of tech sites lately. Heck, there's quite a few of them on this article alone. At first, I was like "Welcome to what it was like for us Apple guys 5-10 years ago", (not that I ever posted that, I just thought it). But the more I think about it, I think it just means that the iPhone, iPod, Apple, etc., is going more mainstream. I don't think its a purposeful marketing strategy on anyones part (maybe it is and I'm too blinded to see), but more or less just a natural affect of its growing user market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was something coming out of MS, Verizon, Dell, or the likes that was interesting, I'm sure we would be flooded with the same kind of daily stories about it. But that's just not happening. Is it because they are not producing anything that people feel compelled to write about or is it because they know that if they write something that has an "i" in the headline, then they will generate hits. Not sure, but it's kind of interesting either way.
And on a side note, your "viral" theory can be applied to your comment as well. How do I know that all the "I'm getting sick of all the Apple" comments aren't made by paid shills or some viral marketing company trying to make Apple look un-cool or whatever. Sure it's a conspiracy theory, but it's no less of one than yours.
Innovation is not necessarily invention (Score:5, Insightful)
See, that's the thing that Apple does so well. They don't invent things. They make other inventions actually work.
Through exhaustive design iteration and engineering, they develop ideas that are "nice on paper but useless in practice" into things that actually deliver on the invention's promise. From desktop UNIX to high-capacity music players to the mobile web browser, Apple invented none of these, yet they all sucked until Apple treated each one not as a feature problem but as a design and usability problem.
That's not invention. But if it isn't innovation, I don't know what is.
Re:ok (Score:3, Insightful)
If it indiscriminately terminates processes because the running app needs more memory, its not really practical to say it supports multitasking. You are just trying to redefine the accepted meaning of a multitasking smart phone to fit your fancy.
I might be biased though, I'm writing this from my HTC Hero with Android 1.6
Re:ok (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger issue here is the narrow definition of "innovation"* so often used at /. and other tech-centric places, in which innovation only means innovation in a strictly technological/programming/hardware sense of the word. Behind this conceit lies the assumption that the only innovation which matters is purely technological innovation, and all of the other aspects, including making these innovations easy to use and accessible for wide range of people, are looked up on as somehow less than.
Hence the constantly renewing Year of Linux on the Desktop, which ignores the fact even the best-packaged Linux distros are at best a mixed bag when it comes to usability. Hence the constant claims that the iPhone/iPod will soon fall from its perch because its focus is ease of use and accessibility and not "innovation". Hence the boiling down of the wide variety of things which must go into a successful product as "cool" or "marketing", etc.
Apple's particular current genius lies in its ability to take technology and package it for use by a wide variety of people who don't care about the technology per se, and a big part of this is the iPod Touch/iPhone's UI, which makes it so easy even your grandmother can tweet away to her heart's content. And I think the reason Apple catches so much flack here, and elsewhere, is that by giving the "sheep" access to the technology, it take away from the n3rd world the special acclaim they have given themselves for having access to that technology.
That thought aside, the fact that so very few tech companies are able to do what Apple does should tell you how incredibly difficult it is to do, and why it is as innovative as any other tech achievement. Microsoft has, quite literally, money to burn and the best they can do is constantly bandage over the larger usability nightmares in Windows and Windows Mobile. Palm had to almost die before they came up with WebOS. Gnome and KDE have a (relatively) large installed base and access to talented people and the best they can come up with is a model which, sometimes, is easier to use than Windows. YOur average cel phone UI is a nightmare of menus, submenus, confusing icons and deeply-buried features. And on and on.
Making technology easy to use is incredibly difficult and every bit as innovative as writing a new OS or designing a new chip. And, while Apple has made, and will continue, to make stupid decisions, when it comes to what they do, they do do it so very well.
*There is a further conceit here, as to the true nature of innovation. There seems to be the idea that "true" innovators are the geniuses who come up with a wholly original idea, develop that idea, get it to market and retire to sleep on a bed of money. Look at this history of technology and you will see that almost never happens. Almost every innovation you can think of is either an improvement on an earlier idea or a new combination of previously established technology and ideas. Henry Ford, to pick one at random, didn't invent a damn thing. He took the idea of assembly lines and interchangeable parts from weapons manufacture, combined it with a newly available urban workforce and clever marketing (any color you want as long as its black) which was actually based on sound logistical planning, and created the modern car industry. It's the same with the computer industry. Progress is the story of incremental improvement and assembly of ideas and not sudden advances out of nowhere.
Or that's my $0.02
Re:iPhone do two things "uniquely" (Score:1, Insightful)
When was the last time you checked out the mobile market? Pretty much every phone has large screens, and slim cases, even the dirt cheap ones, without keyboards (and as someone who would prefer an actual keyboard, I find it annoying).
(And before anyone says it was the Iphone that caused this - screens have continually being getting larger since before the Iphone, and it was an obvious progression to what we have now; the Iphone wasn't first with touchscreen AFAIK; and slim cases were around before - e.g., Motorola's RAZR.)
The key to a beating the iPhone
Check out the market share - most companies, such as Nokia and Samsung, are already beating it. Of course I'll probably be modded down for saying so, because debates on Apple stories are won by whoever has mod points (which is never me, incidentally), and not who speaks the facts.
Re:Daily Apple Slashvertisement again. (Score:3, Insightful)
And sure enough, just after I post about how people here seem to have no idea of the phone market, one comes along:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was something coming out of MS, Verizon, Dell, or the likes that was interesting
Well, what about all of the interesting phones that are coming from Nokia, Samsung, Motorola etc? Virtually zero coverage, it's been that way for years - so yes, I'm correcting you that you are wrong :)
Unless for some reason, there's something special about MS, Verizon, Dell and Apple that they deserve coverage, but not the existing phone companies?
As for viral, I don't think he's suggesting that it's planted by Apple shills - personally I don't, but the point is that Apple are very good at getting other companies and individuals to give them free advertising and hype. No shills needed.
Re:iPhone do two things "uniquely" (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually you'll probably be modded down for continually posting whiney little rants.
Re:Then all phone companies innovate (Score:4, Insightful)
Good band recognition and marketing qualify as technical innovation now?
Re:ok (Score:3, Insightful)
in browser stats Apple has -nearly half- of browser marketshare for smartphones
As another posted noted, those stats are only for the US. The US has been slow to take up mobile phones for several reasons, so it's not representative of the global market.
But anyway. I'd like to quickly address the assumption that mobile web browser stats can be used as a way to measure mobile phone market share. I have a Nokia 5220, a simple GSM/EDGE phone with an S40 interface. I rarely use the built-in (WAP?) browser because the screen is small and loading modern web/wap pages over EDGE is still quite slow. And it sometimes runs out of memory on complex pages. But I do however have quite a few Java apps that use the Internet to send and receive various bits of data. Through these apps I use up most of the credit on my pre-paid account. So just because the iPhone has shown up on some web browser stats probably doesn't mean as much as you think.
Re:Newton wins? (Score:3, Insightful)
I own two Newtons. Both fit in my jeans pocket, even if they are much larger than my Android phone, or an iPhone. Of course, the first is an original Newton from 1994.
The Newton was innovative. It could do fascinating things with very low power requirements on a very legible screen, and most of the things it could do well the iPhone still doesn't do. "Assist" alone was an excellent feature that many people never saw in action. For example, you're on a blank notes page and you type "Remember Brian's birthday on wednesday" and tap assist. Your calendar pops up on the next Wednesday starting from tomorrow and puts a reminder up "Brian's birthday".
Simple enough? Sure. Easier than scrolling, tapping and creating the memo yourself? Definitely.
I brought my Newton along to a major event around the time Microsoft was pushing their tablets and I showed it to the Microsoft evangelist who was trying to convince me the tablet was amazing. I showed him shape recognition and started doing diagrams on the screen at full speed. He was a little shocked, especially when I pointed out (again) that it was over ten years old.
People have even written driver interfaces for the Newton to allow the use of huge flash memory drives to use it as an MP3 player. Do I wish Apple would bring it back? Maybe not the way it was, but I was one of many who hoped the iPhone would be at least as capable as the Newton was. And yes, it had E-mail support, but no browser built-in.
Re:quality journos? (Score:4, Insightful)
You never used a Newton, did you? I have netbooks, I have an Android phone, and I have two Newtons.
I can still demonstrate things that are easier to do on the Newton than on a tablet, notebook, iphone, etc. Some of them aren't even possible except on a Newton.
Re:ok (Score:3, Insightful)
"The iPhone UI sucks a lot harder than WebOSs, and it is no better than Android.
The ONLY selling point of the iPhone is the ecosystem. Brand loyalty, huge number of apps and huge installed base. The phone itself is bland compared to all the other offerings(most new phones are essentially an iPhone plus a couple other features, like a high res display or a physical keyboard), and the software is about as advanced as Palm OS 4.0. I don't know how Apple can ship a product in 2009 that doesn't support multitasking."
The iPhone multitasks just fine. It doesn't allow third party apps to do so unless you jailbreak the phone. Had you actually used one at any point, you would know that, simply by launching the iPod app. It will run happily in the background while you do other things, as does the mail app, and SMS. As to how it multitasks is just an implementation. Saying it doesn't do so because it doesn't fit your ideal for managing background apps doesn't make it 'not so'. Many OS's will simply stop a low priority background thread if the user launches a foreground task that needs the memory. Personally, I don't know why folks are wanting multitasking outside of the Apple apps. I've never felt a need other than the supplied apps. Knowing the way things work in the windows world, every app you installed would find some Apple equivalent of the System tray to load useless tasks which suck your battery dry within an hour. I prefer less hassle. The only other client I would need it on is AIM, and they will happily forward it to me as a reply-able SMS, so the point is mute.
In order to get those huge number of apps and installed base, it has to have something other than those items you mentioned. I bought one, and I had owned no previous Apple products. Just saying it's popular due to 'fanboys' is patently ridiculous and tells me your more interested in just hating Apple rather than actually using one of their products. This whole 'fanboy' bit is silly. If you buy something, anything, chances are that you are a fan. Most people who hate a product don't buy it. Working in IT, I've met all kinds, and I wouldn't classify any of them as raving lunatics. They are all people who just like Windows PC's, or Macs. They don't rave. They don't pray at the Alter of Steve. They prefer a brand and they stick with it until they find something better.
The iPhone is popular because it's pretty much a PC in your pocket. You can actually browse the web on it, the UI is arguably better than the current crop of contenders since none of these iPhone 'killers' has actually done any slaying yet. All of these followers exist in an attempt to clone the iPhone UI, and none of them have succeeded fully yet (although some of them are getting close). The app limits on Android need to be resolved before they can be considered a serious contender.