Sorry, I was going to give summarize at the cyberguide group meeting today,
but I'll summarize for the entire group.
The Newton MessagePad 2000 (called, affectionately, the MP2K) and its
166MHz StrongARM is wicked-fast. Not just fast, but truly wicked-fast. You
cannot outrun the handwriting recognition and every action, no matter how
complicated, is instantaneous. Notoriously slow tasks (such as using assist
or adding invitees to a meeting) finish in a snap. With the 2.0 OS, Apple
got the software right. With the MP2K, finally the hardware support is
there as well.
I tried some VERY naive benchmarks of vector rendering allowing zooming
in/out (no scaling) and the improvement over the MP130 was incredible. In
the time that the MP2K was done drawing, the 130 was still thinking about
calculating the extents of the vectors. The code I used was hacked up in
about 6 hours from scratch (a good testament to NewtonScript) and I'm sure
a true implementation with caching and an intelligent method would result
in an even greater speedup.
The screen is also larger, so you end up getting a lot more display space
in which to draw because the dpi is higher as well. In addition, the
display is grayscale (16 grays).
On top of all that, add the ability to record and play sounds. The
omni-directional mic (built-in) can record up to 4 hours of speech on a 4MB
flash card. Imagine being able to voice annotate any object on the map.
For the 1/2 the price of a laptop, you get more performance, 24 hours of
continuous battery life (most laptops are about 2-3 hours), and a user
interface that is designed from the ground up to be mobile. Additionally,
The Internet enabler as well as WWW and mail clients are in ROM.
At the risk of sounding retro, "It does more, it costs less, it's that
simple"
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Mike Pinkerton
mpinkert@cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/mpinkert
Cyberdog: On the Internet, no one knows you're an OpenDoc part